The Eighth Passenger
by Zurock
Summary: Short story. The plot of the 1979 classic science fiction horror film "Alien", but with the protagonists of Friendship is Magic and Derpy "playing" the roles of the film's cast. Also, the story's direction is focused on comedy rather than horror.
1. Nomastromo Rerouted

Chapter 1: Nomastromo Rerouted

Designation: Nomastromo  
Make: M-Class Star-Freighter  
Classification: Commercial Towing Starship  
Cargo: Refinery processing 20,000,000 tons of magical ore  
Course: Returning to Equestria  
Crew Complement: 7

The powerful drive engines of the starship Nomastromo burned to brake the ship's course, bringing the vessel down to a steady drift through space. Inside, the ship seemed nearly frozen. Cold, lifeless, and silent, the three pressurized decks had a thin atmosphere and walls coated in a light layer of tiny crystals from whatever moisture had stayed in the air. They glistened in the darkness, bouncing what meager amounts of illumination they received from the ship's hibernation mode lighting.

Warm air began to flow through the vents, accompanied by the chugging of the air processing units kicking into full gear. Mechanical swishes rang with the motion of internal mechanisms adjusting themselves to respond to the atmospheric controls. Lights came up on all decks and various displays and monitors around the ship booted, crackling with some minor static. On the bridge of the ship, located on the top deck, many displays defaulted to a logo screen, bearing the ship's name and the owning company's logo in bold lettering backed by the silhouette of a pegasus boldly shooting into the stars. Electronic chatter between all the equipment filled the air with a low, drumming white noise. Life came back to the Nomastromo.

On the same deck, the last of the lights came on in a dead-end corridor at the corner of the ship. The sturdy white door at the end rose and there was a brief clash and equalizing of atmospheres, since the room behind was run and maintained on an independent system. The lights in the room brightened, revealing a circular, sterile, pearl area with padded cushioning all about the floors and walls. In the center, a mammoth machine endlessly performed its function: to power and maintain the seven hypersleep chambers that were radially connected to it, spread out like the petals of a flower. The crew stayed in this chamber, sleeping in stasis for the course of their trip through the cosmos.

The main computer of the ship pushed a signal through. Adjustments to the internal atmosphere had been made and the vessel was ready. It was time to wake the crew. The droning of the hypersleep machine changed, softening and slowing in tone as it modified each chambers parameters to bring consciousness back to the inhabitants. Indicators on each of the chambers lit up to show when its occupant had normal, stationary readings. Once all were green, the lids of all seven chambers simultaneously unlatched and gently raised. Inside each, one pony lay down sleeping a regular sleep, brought back from the frozen stillness of hypersleep.

After several minutes of silence, there was finally a stirring in the chamber closest to the door. With the most sluggish of motions, a white hoof raised up and pressed down on the side of the mechanical bedding. The unicorn inside forced herself up, straining her weak, awakened breathing. She sat there, taking a few good breathes, bigger with each draw. At last, she shook her head to try to push out the potent delirium that filled her, a motion that dislodged the cucumber slices that had been resting over her eyes. Reaching over her head, she checked to make sure the towel wrapping her hair hadn't fallen out of place. Blinking and getting focus back in her eyes, she wielded her magic to pick up a smaller tower resting by the side of her chamber, which she used to wipe the beauty cream off her face.

Every time she got out of one of these hypersleep chambers she swore she had never been so achy and stiff in her life, and this time proved no different. She eased over the side, bit by bit, until she finally planted all four hooves down on the padded floor. While she made her way over to the wall where crew bathrobes hung, she felt out her body's movements again, fresh and new. She passed the six plain, white robes that were hung there and went straight to the special, secluded hook where her royal purple robe with golden colored trimmings waited for her.

A pampered but delirious cat, white as snow, reached her small claw up over the edge of the hypersleep chamber that the unicorn had emerged from. The animal hardly had the energy to hiss her seething discontent, her irritability being the one thing that came back to her instantly.

* * *

In the common area on the top deck, just a corridor down from the hypersleep vault, everypony was up and gathered around the large table which filled the room. It was covered with food containers, plates, cups, and all the standards for a usual space freighter's crew's breakfast, and the shifting and passing of foods and goods made up half the noise in the room. The other half was the limp conversation between the crew; their chatter could hardly be described as lively, but they did their best to talk the hypersleep weariness out of themselves.

Most of them were only partially dressed. Some were still wet from having washed themselves first before sitting down for breakfast and were wrapped mostly in towels. The ship's Navigator, Fluttershy, had multiple towels coating her and she shivered as she complained of the cold.

Only the Magic Officer, Twilight, deigned it important enough to be in full uniform for the first meal. It was a bright blue uniform abounded with pockets and buttons. An identity patch on the shoulder carried the seal of the Magic Division, along with her rank, the ship's name, and employee number.

The Engineering Technician, Derpy, heavily blinked her eyes as she worked to rid herself of her sleepiness. She could tell something was wrong because everything she saw was crisp and focused. Slamming her head down once into the table, her eyes were rolling in her head when she lifted it back up. Lazily they settled into a much more natural crosswise position and she smiled with relief.

To her left sat Applejack, her boss and the ship's chief Engineer, who was bemused with the technician's antics. "You're still with us, sugarcube, right?" the engineer asked her partner.

"Right?" Derpy queried in confusion, and she turned her head in that direction. However, all she saw was the pony sitting to her right, the Warrant Officer, Pinkie Pie.

The white unicorn, sitting to Applejack's left and still wrapped in her extravagant bathrobe, rubbed her face sorely. This was Rarity, the ship's Executive Officer and second in command. "Augh... I feel dead," she moaned.

"Anypony ever tell you you look dead?" Applejack quipped with a brief chuckle.

Rarity glowered back at her, but the feeling of being a walking zombie seemed pretty equally shared around the room. Every bite of food, every sip of drink, every little joke and smile, worked to ease them back into their senses. The lukewarm coffee was probably the biggest help, though. The pot was being passed around the table with frequent regularity.

During a lull in the table conversation, Applejack seized the moment to speak up. Loudly, to be sure everypony could hear her, she said, "Oh yeah, right, I just remembered something. Now, before we dock, I think we oughta discuss the bonus situation. Derpy and I," she gestured to her engineering partner, "we think we deserve full shares. Right, sugarcube?"

"Right?" Derpy asked, and again twisted her neck to look to her right. Like before, all she saw was Pinkie Pie, who by now had enough energy to give a big smile back to Derpy. The lost pony looked back at Applejack with a befuddled stare.

Applejack shoved a hoof quickly into Derpy's gut.

"Oof! Oh! Yeah. Uhh..." Derpy suddenly seemed to remember. She rambled in a rehearsed manner, "Applejack and I think that the bonus situation isn't fair."

Sitting roughly across from Derpy and next to Rarity, Captain Rainbow Dash calmly took a sip of her own coffee. This wasn't the first time the engineers had brought up the matter of payment and, knowing Applejack, it wouldn't be the last. But their pay wasn't Rainbow Dash's concern and she dismissed it as she usually did, saying, "Well, you get what you contracted for, like everypony else."

"Yeah, but everypony else gets more than us," Applejack casually emphasized.

A single-toned beep sounded in the room, but like so many other noises of a working starship, it passed right through the ears of most of the hungry and unrefreshed ponies. Twilight recognized it immediately and, without even looking up from the milky white drink she was pouring for herself, she commented, "Rainbow Dash, Mother wants to talk to you."

Rainbow Dash, a little surprised at having missed the noise, looked over at a rack of displays on the wall to see a blinking, lighted indicator which confirmed the news. "Yeah, I see it," she responded. She pushed up out of her seat with a stretch, joking in a pretend haughty tone, "The light's for my eyes only!" She grabbed her half-finished coffee cup in her mouth and made her way over to the bridge.

"Can I get some coffee?" Applejack asked out loud, with some minute disdain at having the payment conversation curtailed. "It's the only thing worth two bits on this darn ship."

Passing through the bridge to get to Mother's control chamber, Rainbow Dash stopped to take another sip of her coffee and put on her uniform jacket. It was a heavy jacket, and dirty brown with the ship's name emblazoned on the back in yellow. Like Twilight's uniform, an identity patch was present on the shoulder. Typically that was all of the uniform she wore, without the jacket ever being closed up. This ship hauled cargo back and forth across the reaches of space; it wasn't the most glorified position of service to ever exist. She was only going to wear what she thought was comfortable and the company was only big on pushing regulations that affected the bottom line. Besides, the jacket got bonus points for looking wore, beaten, and totally awesome.

She went to the back of the bridge and through a small, secure hall lined with computer banks to get to Mother's chamber. Mother was the name of the rudimentary AI which ran the Nomastromo. Largely her purpose was to handle all the automated systems of the ship and alert to crew to anything that would need manual intervention. The long trips through space were often very uneventful and a pony crew was only necessary at times few and far between, but they always had to be present, just in case. In all other situations, Mother, and AI's like her, were capable of steering a starship through the empty regions of the galaxy on their own.

The chamber itself was described as a blister by the engineers, being bubble shaped in design. Dead in the center was a chair for an operator sit to at, complete with a keyboard text interface to Mother, and the whole setup faced a monitor on the far wall for Mother's output. The rest of the room was coated in small, blinking, white lights whose flashing patterns made no discernible sense to anypony. They were all pretty sure that the lights were installed merely to look futuristic.

Setting her mug down to one side of the keyboard, Rainbow Dash sat in the chair. She mashed the space bar once to wake Mother's display out of power save mode. "Morning, Mother," she hailed as the screen came to life.

Mother dumped a list of main menu commands onto her display. It was a long chain of selectable commands... anything a pony could want for getting details on the ship or doing other tasks. Besides all the options for diagnostics and internal ship controls, there were various support programs listed for research efforts and planet surveys, some history and bookkeeping entries, solitaire, a few emulators and ROMs, abort, retry, and fail.

Rainbow Dash tapped at the keyboard and selected the "Interface" option, allowing general direct queries to be given to Mother for computation or response.

The screen cleared and then offered back to her: "READY FOR INQUIRY".

She typed in the question, "What's the story, Mother?"

* * *

Back on the bridge, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, and Fluttershy all entered in their respective uniforms to join Twilight, who was already waiting there fully dressed. Rarity's uniform resembled Rainbow Dash's, though the unicorn insisted on cleaning it up, wearing it properly, and adding embellishments. Nothing fancy... just a few jewels she had placed here and there, the inside of the collar was lined with decorative crystals, and the zipper had been replaced with one made from gold. Pinkie Pie's and Fluttershy's uniforms were much simpler, lighter jackets, in deep blue and soft green respectively. Identity patches were on the shoulder of every uniform.

The ponies sat down at their individual stations. Enough time had passed that they were feeling free of the burdens of hypersleep and their spirits were lifted knowing that their trip across the stars would soon be over. All that was left was to dock back over Equestria so the cargo could be unloaded. Then they could relax at home, instead of being sequestered away at cramped stations on Palominus, out in the middle of deep space.

"Okay," Rarity said, sitting down and magically securing her belt, "Plug us in."

Pinkie Pie flicked several switches on her station and the bridge controls changed over to manual mode, bringing all the ponies' stations online.

"Thank you," Twilight said, immediately setting to work.

Fluttershy's station displayed a star map, focusing on the ship's current position. With a curious stare, she tilted her head to one side and wondered if perhaps she was just seeing something wrong. "Uh oh... where's Equestria?"

Rarity looked at the pegasus with surprised eyes. It was pretty much the last thing she expected to hear from a navigator. "You should know," she answered in astonishment.

Pressing a button, Twilight brought up the star map on one of her displays and looked it over. "That's not our system," she commented.

Looking deeply unhappy with the implications of what she was seeing, Fluttershy brought up the ship's course history and started to search through it.

"Contact traffic control," Rarity commanded, hoping that they were close enough to Equestria to be picked up and guided in if the navigation system was on the fritz.

Securing a headset on herself, Pinkie Pie held one hoof against the headset earpiece so she could listen carefully. She toggle a switch on her board to enable broadcast and tried to reach any potential receivers with a standard greeting. "Hello? HEEELLLLLLLOOO?" she sang out. "Anypony there? If you're there, pick up! Pick up, pick up, pick up! ... Hello?" She waited a few moments for any responses but received only static. Humming in thought, she changed up her approach. "Oooooookay! DON'T pick up! I dare you not to pick up!" No response. "We have ICE CREAM! Plenty of ice cream! But if you don't pick up you won't get any! ... Hello?" Switching the broadcast off, Pinkie Pie shrugged to Rarity, "Nopony's home."

"Keep trying!" Rarity grumbled in annoyance. Like Fluttershy, she didn't want to accept what all this might mean.

Pinkie Pie thought deeply for a moment. "I got it!", she yelled and flipped her broadcast unit back on. "Knock knock!"

At Fluttershy's station, she had the computer draw the route they had taken and finished calculating their current position. "Okay. I've found it," she told the others. "We're just short of Zeta II Reticuli. We haven't even reached the Outer Rim yet..." she moaned in disappointment.

"That's hard to believe..." Rarity said.

"What are we doing out here?" Fluttershy asked. Scanning over her star map, it was clear the Nomastromo had taken quite a bit of a detour from the straight route to Equestria.

"I don't know," Rarity honestly answered.

"Get it?" Pinkie Pie giggled into her comm. "Because you're supposed to say, 'who's there' but then I act like you said, 'hooves' hair' and..." but she still wasn't getting a response. "Oh, come on!" she shouted, flicking the broadcast off in a huff and folding her forelegs.

* * *

Down in the lowest deck, C deck, Applejack and Derpy walked about giving everything the once over. All the main engineering systems were present on C deck and it was standard procedure to check up on everything after coming out of hypersleep. Technically Mother should have alerted them to any problems that might have occurred on the trip that physically needed their support but any good engineer knew that the moment you started blindly trusting the machine would be the moment something would silently go wrong.

Their own uniforms were by far more casual than the rest of the crew, mostly being street clothes with the identity patch attached, further separating them from the others. Both ponies wore hats as well. Applejack's was a brown, wide-brimmed hat which was a well known personal effect of her's and Derpy wore a navy blue baseball cap with the logo of her alma mater, "Cloudsdale School of Engineering and Mail Service".

While striding to the next hall to continue their check, Applejack jovially asked her partner, "Listen, you ever notice how they never come on down here? I mean, this is where all the work is."

"It's the same reason we get... uhhh..." Derpy tried to answer. She held up a hoof to help her count, but the indistinct appendage didn't prove to be much assistance. If only she had some kind of... enumerable, individually manipulable extensions on her hoof! "The same reason we get..."

"Half?" Applejack offered.

"Yeah!" Derpy exclaimed. "A half share! And they get a... two... half share."

Applejack chuckled but continued her joke, "Yeah, but I think I know why they don't come on down here! It's because of you! You don't have no real personality. Mostly. Leastwise, not so much in canon, anyway."

* * *

Around the main table in the common area, the bridge crew had gathered and sat on Rainbow Dash's instruction. The captain herself stood, waiting for the engineers to arrive so she could make the announcement of what she learned from Mother. She could feel the discontent from the bridge crew, unhappy that what they had woken up expecting hadn't become reality, and she knew Applejack and Derpy wouldn't take it any better. What's more, not everypony would be happy with the reason for these events.

Eventually the engineers arrived, with Applejack still in a jolly mood. Derpy took her regular seat, which happened to be next to Twilight, and Applejack followed her up to take her own usual position. She needed only to remove one obstacle.

"Uh... you happen to be in my seat," she cordially said to Twilight while tapping the unicorn once and gesturing to the side.

Twilight rolled her eyes and quietly snorted at the obsession with assigned seating, but she didn't offer any physical objection. She stood up and took a single step to the side, opting to make her point by standing between Applejack and Pinkie Pie for the duration of the meeting, instead of walking to the other side of the table to one of the empty seats.

"Thank you kindly," Applejack said. She grabbed the hat off her head and dusted her seat off with it. Tossing her hat back on, she lowered her head and carefully aligned the chair to the perfect position, moving it a few centimeters to the left, a few less to the right, then just once more to the left again... When she had gotten the seat just perfect, she aggressively leapt over the back of it and landed in it, jostling the whole set up and shaking the entire table with a loud thud.

Ignoring all the stares that had gotten her, Applejack started the meeting, continuing with her genial energy. "What's happening now, sugarcube?" she asked Rainbow Dash.

Rainbow Dash stepped up and leaned forward on the table between Fluttershy and Rarity. Observing the crew for a second to make sure she had center stage, she addressed them, "Well. Some of you may have figured out that we're not home yet. We're only halfway there."

Despite the bridge crew already sharing that knowledge, there was still groans from them at its awful confirmation.

The cheery mood was promptly wiped from Applejack's face. "What?" she asked out loud, stained with disbelief.

"Mother's interrupted the course of our journey," Rainbow Dash continued.

"Why?" Rarity immediately asked.

"During automated trips, Mother's programmed to take certain actions if specific conditions arise. She re-routes course around unexpected obstacles, seals decks if there's a sudden loss of pressure, abruptly terminates the function to the hypersleep chambers and kills us if there's a fault in the AE-35 unit... that sort of thing," Rainbow Dash explained for the benefit of the readers. The crew were veteran cargo runners, after all, and they knew how their own ship worked.

Pinkie Pie asked, "So what happened?"

Taking a big breath, Rainbow Dash revealed, "Seems she's intercepted a transmission of unknown origin. She got us up to check it out."

"A transmission?" Rarity said in surprise. "Out here?"

Rainbow Dash nodded in confirmation.

"What kind of a transmission?" Fluttershy wanted to know.

"Twelve second industrial techno loop," Rainbow Dash answered.

"SOS?" Rarity asked.

"I don't know."

"Pony?" Pinkie Pie cryptically inquired of the signal's origin.

Rainbow Dash furrowed her brow, wobbled her raised hooves in the air, and spun a creepy tone onto to her voice. "Unknooown... Oooooo! Spooky!"

While Fluttershy nervously shrunk back in her seat, Derpy's discordant eyebrows moved in opposite directions. She didn't understand what any of this meant and openly questioned, "So... what?"

Applejack snickered at her partner's reaction with an air of agreement.

"We are obligated under section-" Rarity tried to explain.

"I, uh, I hate to bring this up..." Applejack interrupted, "but this is a commercial ship, not a rescue ship. Right, Derpy?"

"Right?" Derpy asked. She cranked her head to check, but since both Rainbow Dash and Twilight were standing, she saw nothing but two empty chairs to the side of the table. Shifting in her seat and twisting her whole body, she kept looking more and more towards the right, almost reaching all the way around to her left before she slipped out of her chair and tumbled onto the floor.

"It's not in my contract to do this kind of duty," Applejack elaborated. "And what about the money? If ya'll want to pony up some money for me to do it I would be happy to oblige."

A gray hoof shot up from under the table. "Yay! Money!"

Annoyed, Rainbow Dash grumbled, "Applejack, w-"

"Let's go over the bonus situation! We never-" Applejack tried to insist.

Unexpectedly, Twilight thrust herself into the conversation, also aggravated at the engineer's constant interrupting. "Can we just-" she started.

Unwilling to let the topic go, Applejack vocally overpowered her. "We never talked about the bonus situation!"

Twilight turned and appealed to Rainbow Dash, the irritability bursting from her voice. "I'm sorry, but can I say something?"

There was a moment of silence while Rainbow Dash nodded and gave her the go ahead.

Focusing back on Applejack, Twilight stared her down and explained, "There is a clause in the contract which specifically states: 'any systematized transmission indicating either a possible intelligent origin or some potentially sweet grooves MUST be investigated...'"

Applejack rolled her head over in frustration, looking away. "Aw, I don't want to hear it," she complained.

Mounting her front hooves on her chair and pushing herself off the floor, Derpy was almost back up from her spill. "We don't know if it's intelligent!" she objected, before her misplaced weight caused the chair to slip out from under her and she collapsed all over again with a loud crash.

"I just want to git on home and party," Applejack continued griping.

"Applejack, will you just listen to the pony?" Rainbow Dash angrily shouted, pointing again to Twilight in order to give her a chance to finish.

Twilight picked up, "... or suffer penalty of total forfeiture of shares. NO. MONEY."

"You got that?" Rainbow Dash heavily emphasized.

She knew she was beat, but Applejack wasn't the least bit happy about it. Spitefully, she put on a cocky grin and laughed with veiled sarcasm. "Heh, well, yeah, I got it."

"Alright then. We're going in," Rainbow Dash implicitly ordered. She pushed off of the table and left for the bridge. Most of the rest of the crew got up and began to follow her.

Still keeping up her appearance, Applejack turned to Derpy. "Yeah, we're going in. Aren't we, sugarcube?"

A gray hoof shot up. "Yay! Going in!"

* * *

The Nomastromo gently tugged its cargo across space, hauling it towards the planetoid from which the signal was originating. The refinery and ore storage that the ship was hauling was massive in comparison to the three deck Nomastromo itself, being over forty times the starship's size. But the Nomastromo's engines were quite strong and the good thing about space was that, with so little friction, even a little push carried you a long way. The cargo itself wasn't built for landing on planets like the starship was, though. It was space-loading and space-unloading only. The plan was to insert the refinery into orbit around the planetoid while the Nomastromo disconnected and landed on it.

With a course plotted, Mother automatically and steadily guided the ship towards orbit. Fluttershy counted down the estimate time as they drew close. "Five... four... three... two... one..."

"Equatorial orbit nailed," Twilight confirmed from her station.

All the ponies on the bridge reported their status, and the two engineers down below reported their status over the ship's comm system. Everypony was verifying that things looked good before separating from the cargo.

"DOR is in line," Rainbow Dash read off one of her monitors.

"How's the status on the lifters?" Pinkie Pie asked no pony in particular.

"Give me an EC pressure reading," Rainbow Dash requested aloud.

"Stabilization thrusters firing," Twilight declared.

"Semaphore resolution looks good. Detecting minimal possibility of a resonance cascade," Fluttershy rambled.

"Flux capacitor is fluxing," Rarity noted.

"Neutrino dynamo polarity repulsor quantilizationeration," Pinkie Pie made up on the spot.

The ship's engines and thrusters came to a stable rest. The vessel and cargo floated lightly around the planetoid, caught in orbit by its gravity.

With everything looking good, Rainbow Dash ordered, "Prepare to disengage from platform."

Nodding, Fluttershy announced, "Mark, twenty seconds." She began a new countdown, "Twenty... nineteen... eighteen..."

The Nomastromo delicately pulled away from the refinery, stretching the sturdy umbilical that connected the two. There was a minor vibration and deep metallic noise that spread throughout the ship when the umbilical hit its maximum length, just before Fluttershy's countdown finished.

"Two... one... mark!"

"Disengage," Rainbow Dash commanded.

There was a heavy clunk as the pressurized clamps of the umbilical suddenly let go and the ship shook mildly as it was pushed clear from its cargo.

"Umbilical's clear!" Pinkie Pie reported. "Congratulations! It's a boy!"

Rainbow Dash double checked her own displays and, satisfied, told the crew, "Money's safe. Let's take her down."

The engines lit up and the Nomastromo blasted forward, following the orbit around the planetoid so it could begin careening down into an orbital descent.

Carefully monitoring their trajectory, Rarity ordered, "Roll ninety-two degrees, port yaw."

Thrusters on the side of the ship fired, rotating the ship into position so it would be parallel to the surface of the planetoid as they broke atmosphere. Angling the nose of the ship down, its forward motion carried it out of orbit and slowly dropped it towards its target.

Fluttershy's station finished its estimates and put the approximated distance to the surface on her monitors. She began reading them off, "39,000 meters... 38,000 meters... 37- Uh..." She looked back at the captain, "I'm the navigator, right? Do I get to do more than-"

"Keep counting!" Rainbow Dash barked.

Lowering her head in disappointment, Fluttershy let out a low whine but stuck to her orders. "35,000 meters... 34,000 meters..."

"Turbulence," Twilight predicted. And right on cue, the ship begin to shake lightly. It was cutting into the atmosphere of the planetoid and beginning to meet resistance to its thrust. All the ponies simultaneously checked their seat belts. "Locked and floating," Twilight followed up, dutifully monitoring her station. "You can drop us anytime. We'll catch."

Rainbow Dash raised her hoof over a switch in preparation. She announced loudly, "Alright, inertial dampening is going off. Hold on, ponies, there's going to be a little bump!" The instance she flicked the switch, a tremendous vibration shot through the vessel. If the crew hadn't been buckled in, they would have been flung right from their chairs. It was almost as if the ship had been struck by some kind of light-based torpedo weaponry.

Down in engineering, Applejack and Derpy gripped their stations as the ship continued to rattle violently through its descent. There was an abrupt, loud, whining, metal wrenching noise that came blaring through the walls.

"What in tarnation is that?" Applejack declared, looking about.

Derpy was tapping a hoof on her console. "Uhhh... the pressure dealie," she indicated. "The pressure dealie for deck three is doing a thing. It's thinging."

Applejack peeked over at Derpy's station. Sure enough, the pressure dealie for deck three was thinging in the opposite direction all the other pressure dealies were thinging. "Must've lost a shield," she mused.

Over the comm unit, they heard Rainbow Dash's voice, "Let's just go with it!"

The Nomastromo continued its wild quaking as it approached the surface, the taxed automated systems working to adjust for the thickening atmosphere with as much assistance as the crew could give. Finally the harsh rattling seemed to reach its apex and began to fade, bit by bit. The drop stabilized gradually.

Twilight continued to monitor her equipment with unsplit attention. "Dropping off now," she informed the crew. Her focus hung tightly on one of her monitors which projected their path into the atmosphere. The ship had turned from its nosedive and was beginning to level. "Still dropping." Once it was level they could begin a vertical descent to land. "There we are. We've got it." The ride now wasn't as ice smooth as it was in space, but it was significantly gentler than the worst of their descent.

"Let her drop!" Rainbow Dash instructed.

Fluttershy killed the drive engines on the ship and everypony was struck with a sudden weightlessness as the ship entered freefall. The numbers on her altitude display plummeted.

Throwing off her seat belt, Rainbow Dash swooped out of her chair and dove over to Fluttershy's station, switching the engines back on. The sudden jerk as the ship came to a floating stop threw everypony about in their chairs again. Recovering, Rainbow Dash glared down at Fluttershy. "I meant, 'take her down.' Like, SLOWLY," she gruffly snarled.

"O-oh. W-whoops." Fluttershy gave a retreating smile. "Sorry," she weakly murmured, and hit a key on her station. The Nomastromo began a slow, controlled drop down towards the surface, thrusters firing to bring the ship down as softly as possible.

Returning to her seat, Rainbow Dash buckled back in and reviewed their status. "Navigation lights on," she declared, toggling them on herself. A bright set of flood lights came on under the ship. "Landing gear..." she reported, again enabling it herself. The landing struts deployed, well illuminated by the navigation lights. It would all be a waiting game now.

The roar of the engines increased, decelerating the ship further for a hopefully smooth landing.

Fluttershy's altitude countdown slowed to match the pace of the ship. "800 meters... 700 meters... 600 meters... 500 me-" She grunted in frustration and hit a button at her station labeled, "Details". A progress bar appeared, accompanied by a time estimate. "Twelve... eleven... ten..." she read off. "Nine... eight... nine... eight... seven..."

Everypony on the ship was looking nervously between their stations and each other, feeling the mounting tension as the ship drew closer to a complete landing.

"Three... two... one..."

"NOW," Rainbow Dash ordered, "kill the drive engines."

With the flick of a switch, the thrust died and the ship dropped an estimated less-than-two meters to the surface. The landing legs crunched down on top of some uneven terrain, crushing rocks under the weight and adjusting their malleable struts to stabilize the ship. Even still, the shake that rocked the ship was far more violent than anypony expected. They all seized their chairs tightly in reflex, absorbing the shock.

Small explosions suddenly erupted from Fluttershy's and Twilight's stations, shooting out sparks. The electrical disruption killed many of the lights on the bridge, prompting a number of emergency strobe lights to begin flashing. Some small fires also invoked a loud alarm, noisily beating against the ears of the crew to the point that they had to yell just to communicate to the pony next to them.

Everypony quickly unbuckled themselves. Rarity, Pinkie Pie, and Twilight all grabbed fire extinguishers while Rainbow Dash went to check that Fluttershy was okay. The two unicorns sprayed the separately burning stations liberally, while Pinkie Pie grabbed the head of her extinguisher tightly in her mouth and began beating out a nearby fire with the heavy bottle.

"What the heck happened?" Rainbow Dash screamed demandingly.

Twilight fiddled with her now safe station, shutting off the audio assault of the alarm.

"Will somepony give me a straight answer!" Rainbow Dash shouted, not even adjusting her voice for the loss of the alarm.

"Has the hull been breached?" Rarity worried.

Pinkie Pie looked at her monitors. "I don't see anything. The main pressure dealie's not thinging."

The bridge crew stopped and looked at each other for a moment. Everypony ran back to their own station to double-check Pinkie Pie's assessment. Just to be sure.


	2. Investigate Life Form

Chapter 2: Investigate Life Form

"Secondary Load Sharing Unit is... three to four cells are gone." The ship's comm carried Applejack's voice up to the bridge from C deck, where she and her partner was looking over the damage the Nomastromo had taken while landing.

On the bridge, Rainbow Dash sat at her station resting her head against her hoof, wearily listening to Applejack's report. The other ponies there were gathered closely around her, standing in glow of the emergency lighting since the primary lights had yet to come back up.

"Is that it?" Rainbow Dash complained into the comm.

"Now hold on... uh..." Applejack's voice came through, blurred slightly with static. "I haven't even told ya about the PRIMARY Load Sharing Unit yet."

"And?" the captain heaved.

After a short delay, the reserved response came through: "Yeah... it's pretty much bucked."

"Great," Rainbow Dash moaned. She picked up her head and rubbed her eyes in frustration.

Applejack continued, "We can't fix it out here, anyway. We need to reroute a couple of these ducts. Wouldn't you say, Derpy?"

"Drydock time," Rarity assessed, sounding bothered.

Down on the engineering level, Derpy and Applejack overheard her comment. Unlike the bridge ponies, the engineers only turned their comm on when they actually wanted to speak to the others. Leaving it off otherwise afforded them the opportunity to, mostly, deride their shipmates without being overheard.

Derpy muttered to herself, annoyed, saying, "Drydock... telling ME to drydock... as if I didn't know..." She turned to Applejack. "Are we going to have to drydock?"

The chief engineer clicked her tongue. She hated to give the bridge crew the satisfaction, but Rarity's conclusion was right. Flicking on the comm, Applejack said into it, "Look, we couldn't fix it out here anyway. We gotta reroute all these ducts and, in order to do that, we're gonna hafta drydock." She switched off the comm and shook her head at Derpy.

A sigh came through the speakers and they heard Rainbow Dash's voice. "Anything else?" she asked.

Applejack toggled the comm unit on again. "Some fragments caked up and we've got to clean it all out and repressurize." She snapped the comm off.

"Cake?" Pinkie Pie's delighted voice clearly rang through the comm. "Can I have som-?"

Her voice stopped abruptly and there were several pops and crackles which came through, along with the brief sounds of a scuffle. Suddenly, Rainbow Dash was back on the line. "How long before we're functional?" she asked.

"Oh, the nerve..." Applejack said bitterly.

"Seventeen hours, tell them," Derpy commented.

Switching on the comm for a quick moment, Applejack said, "At least twenty-five hours."

"Oh, yeah..." Derpy realized, "Forgot to include the lunch."

A few more odd, struggling sounds were heard through the comm, but the only thing they caught clearly was from Pinkie Pie. "Feel free to get started, but I'll be right down!" she promised.

"What in Sam Hill is she coming down here for?" Applejack groused with a scowl on her face.

"She better stay away from our cake, I'll tell you that," Derpy replied.

* * *

The lights had finally returned to normal on the bridge after a quick fix to a blown power fuse. Rarity, Fluttershy, and Twilight sat about the area, waiting while a response signal was broadcasted in the direction they were picking up the original transmission from.

Rainbow Dash entered, asking them, "Any response yet?"

"No, absolutely nothing," Twilight reported. "Nothing except the same transmission every twelve seconds. All the other channels are dead."

The captain walked about the bridge slowly, looking at the monitors and thinking to herself. Stopping suddenly near the center, she turned to the navigator. "Fluttershy, let's hear that transmission again."

Fluttershy corrected her slouched posture and fiddled with the controls at her station. With the press of a few keys, she began pumping the mysterious transmission in through the bridge speakers.

It was very faint and broken at first, but it cleared up rapidly as the pegasus homed in on the signal. The power noise started spilling onto the bridge with clarity, thumping and beating with overlapping and clamorous, if repetitive, melodies. It was an unrestrained assault on the ears. Funnily enough, if a pony closed their eyes and listened hard, they could almost mistake it for some kind of hardcore remix of a theme tune to a foal's cartoon show.

"Kick up the bass," Rainbow Dash ordered. Swiftly Fluttershy obeyed, cranking the bass knob several clicks up. The loose articles on the bridge began to bounce with the beat and, with the sheer power behind the vibrations that were charging through, even a deaf pony would be able to hear the music. Rainbow Dash nodded her head along with the rhythm, but it only took a few seconds before she had a hoof in the air and was banging her head as far as her neck would allow.

With her hooves stuffed into her ears, Rarity tiredly moaned, "Alright! That's enough!" Fluttershy respected the request and shut of the transmission, bringing sweet silence back to the room.

During the whole scenario, Twilight hadn't batted an eye. Ever since they landed, she had been engrossed in looking over data at her station, trying to figure things out. She pressed a switch near her which turned on a large array of floodlights around the ship, illuminating their immediate area as much as the stormy conditions on the planetoid would allow. Several monitors at her station tuned to cameras which pointed out from the ship. "Take a look at this," she invited the others.

Rarity and Rainbow Dash ambled to her station and leaned over her shoulders, observing everything on her displays. They could see that they were caught in the middle of an aggressive storm, with howling winds dragging rock fragments across the surface and pelting the hull of the ship. Visibility was barely three or four meters. Most of the light the Nomastromo shot out was bounced back by the thick, gusty fog.

"We can't go anywhere in this," Rarity said.

"Well, Mother says the sun's coming up in twenty minutes," Twilight informed her.

Rainbow Dash shrugged, unsure if that would even make any difference, and kept looking over Twilight's various displays. "How far are we from the source of transmission?" she asked her magic officer.

Putting a hoof up to one of her readouts, Twilight answered, "It's northeast. Just under 2000 meters."

"Walking distance?" Rarity wondered.

Rainbow Dash looked at Rarity with some amusement, a bit surprised that she even remotely seemed to be considering hiking it to the source. Still... if they didn't get a response to their message then they were going to have to go and check it out anyway... She turned back to Twilight and asked, "Can you give me an atmospheric?"

"Yes," Twilight replied, immediately setting about punching keys at her station. One of her monitors cleared up and began printing out a tremendous amount of numbers and symbols, which scrolled by quickly. For a moment, Twilight stopped working and her eyes widened, almost awed at whatever it was she was getting out of the numbers. "Wow... it's almost primordial," she whispered to herself. Snapping back to attention, she read off at a glance, "Xenon, nitrogen, high concentration of carbon dioxide crystals, methane... I'm working on the trace elements."

Frowning, Rainbow Dash sarcastically griped, "Yeah, THAT tells me everything I need to know. Anything else? Anything... you know... important?"

"Uh..." Twilight let out while thinking, striking a few more keys. Different monitors flashed with different information. The unicorn seemed to stumble on something she thought was worth sharing, saying, "Yes. It's... rock."

"WOW, Twilight," Rainbow Dash quickly snipped while looking away.

"Rock... lava base. And deep cold. Well below the line," Twilight reported.

"Mhmm," Rainbow Dash said, still bleeding sarcasm. "That's great. Hey. Did you know we have self-contained environment suits on the ship?" she asked, inflecting her voice to make her meaning even more aggressively clear. The pegasus leaned in very close to Twilight's face. "You know... for exposure to inhospitable environments?"

Rarity spoke up. "For what it's worth, I'd like to volunteer... to stay behind. Those awful suits always ruin my hair." She stroked her mane once, concerned and frightened for the possible future damage it could wind up taking if it had to spend even a minute in one of those stuffy suits.

"Yeah, it figures," Rainbow Dash quipped.

"Uh... if it's alright with you... um... Captain Rainbow Dash," Fluttershy meekly asserted herself, "I'd like to stay here, too." Her chair was generating a tapping noise, the result of how badly her shivering was shaking her seat. "If that's okay with you... um... sir. Captain." Her voice dropped incredibly low, "I don't like spooky things."

Inversely, Twilight was enthusiastic. "I'll go!" she offered. "This is an absolutely incredible opportunity! Potential contact with intelligent, non-pony life!"

Everypony's head turned as there was a buzz from the bridge comm unit and Applejack's voice came through. "I couldn't help but hear ya'll talking 'bout a little expedition? Look, I know we're s'pposed to be repairing and all down here, but..." As she spoke her voice dipped into a panicked honesty. "I'm telling you right now I wouldn't mind a little away time. It's getting a might... claustrophobic-like in this tin can."

Pinkie Pie's voice burst through the comm unexpectedly. "Oh! Oh! Pick me! PICK ME!" she frantically begged. "I'll go! ... Where are we going?"

"Yeeeaaahhhh..." Applejack could be heard moaning. "Or take HER. That'll do."

"Applejack," Derpy's voice came up in the background, "is the converter supposed to burn like this or-"

"SWEET MOTHER OF CELES-" A sharp, warped static hissed for a moment as the comm was suddenly shut off on the engineering end.

Rainbow Dash stepped away from Twilight's station and began pacing the bridge again, thoughtfully humming to herself. She looked at the three other faces with her and back at the comm speaker several times. At last, she stopped her trotting about and stood firmly, having come to a decision.

"Alright," she announced loudly so the comm would catch and carry her voice, "I've taken everypony's opinion under advisement and here is what I think we should do." The pegasus proudly knocked on her own chest with one of her hooves. "If science fiction stories have taught me anything, it's that the captain always goes on the potentially dangerous and life-threatening away missions. So obviously, I'm going." She raised a hoof and started to level it in Twilight's direction, but then rolled completely past her and pointed at Fluttershy. "Fluttershy, you're coming along because I can bully you into doing anything I don't want to do."

Sadly, the navigator's head drooped and she stared at the floor. "Okay..." she surrendered without a fight.

"And Twilight..." Rainbow Dash announced.

The unicorn excitedly perked up at the mention of her name.

"... you're staying here. We'll need somepony to monitor us remotely. Plus you can keep those hoofheads down below on task," the captain ordered.

"What," Twilight flatly stated.

Whipping around, Rainbow Dash pointed at her second-in-command. "Rarity, you're coming."

"What?" Rarity shrieked. "Why?"

"I dunno," Rainbow Dash indifferently admitted with a shrug. "I like to see you suffer, I guess."

* * *

The sound of the zipper going up seemed unusually satisfying as Twilight sealed her green jumpsuit. The unicorn took a second to feel out her new garment and make sure she had fitted it on properly. Stepping forward in order to head to the monitoring station in the room, she was seized by a sudden stiffness and did a rapid jog in place to relieve it, nervously looking around to see if anypony had caught sight of her. Relieved and loosened, she went over to some consoles connected to the wall.

Twilight was in the away team monitoring bay, a small room designed for a single operator to interface with displays that were linked to all remote team members. A swiveling chair was stationed near a sturdy, impact-resistant glass bubble which looked out over one side of the ship. From there the operator could keep an eye on any members who were working on or near the outside of the ship. The board of monitors and consoles next to the chair were what allowed the operator to see what all the linked members see, and to communicate with them.

Waiting patiently in the Nomastromo's airlock was Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Fluttershy, all suited up in their self-contained, pressurized environment suits. They were heavy, bulky suits that needed to carry all the equipment necessary to maintain their own internal atmosphere, allowing ponies to move about and explore in some of the harshest of places. The most striking feature of the padded, cumbersome suits was the helmet. Large and bulbous, the transparent face shield was incredibly wide so the wearer could view a significant amount of their periphery field of vision, but it amusingly made it appear like their head was sitting in the middle of a fishbowl. A lamp on top provided illumination, and the back of the helmet connected directly to an air recycling system which, when active, would occasionally let out puffs of irredeemable gas. Rainbow Dash's and Fluttershy's suits had patches on their backs made of a strong, tight, flexible material that allowed their wings to be comfortably stretched and utilized. Lastly, each suit had a small bubble just above their rear which the wearing pony's tail was unceremoniously crammed into. A butt-bubble, if you will.

Rarity scratched vainly at her tail in agony, feeling the sweltering suit slowly destroying all the laborious work she had put in to making it the pinnacle of brushable perfection. It was like being locked away while knowing that mercenary forces were out slaughtering your entire family, only worse because this was HER TAIL. She whined breathlessly, her suit radio transmitting the sound to her two companions and to Twilight's board.

"Can it," Rainbow Dash heatedly commanded.

In short order, the airlock fully depressurized and the outer hatch opened, granting access to the surface of the planetoid. The blaring noise of the massive winds screaming patch the hatch immediately became noticeable, and small rocks and other debris were flung into the airlock by the gusts. The three crew members stepped out onto a lift, which lowered them down to the cold, rocky surface.

Twilight looked out of her bubble at them, waving and giggling in amusement. Even at this range it was hard to see them through the fog, but the ship's floodlights and their suits' headlamps were sufficient to make them distinct.

"I can't see a thing," Fluttershy complained.

"I think I, ah, I forgot my hair brush inside," Rarity babbled. "Why don't you two go on ahead and I'll-"

Rainbow Dash rammed her from behind, pushing her forward. "Come on! Get moving!" the impatient pegasus snapped. Then, yelling into her suit radio to try and overcome the unbearable roar of the wind, Rainbow Dash asked, "Twilight! Are you receiving?"

"Good contact on my board," Twilight answered. She looked across her displays. She could see what each of them was seeing, via video transmitted from their suit cameras, though she got a fairly low quality image because the company had skimped on the Wi-Fi service. Regardless, the connection signal to each suit was strong.

"Alright," Rainbow Dash determined, "Keep the line open. Let's go." She forced herself into Rarity, continuing to push the reluctant unicorn forward.

* * *

Down below, Applejack and Derpy were hard at work rerouting the ship's ducts so they could make a safe take-off when the time came. The horrible storm combined with the shaky descent had caused an uncountable number of stony fragments to become lodged in the systems during landing. Not to mention that the blown pressure shield had resulted in internal damage that left a huge vulnerability open. Several pipes in the area were blasting warm steam as the engineers were testing which conduits were damaged or blocked.

Pinkie Pie, meanwhile, roamed the area freely, shoving her face and hooves into all manner of cracks and crevices in the ship's structure, searching for the mythical confection she had heard the engineers mention earlier. She spotted an open vent that had yet to be cleaned, dirt and grime oozing along the walls. Deciding to be absolutely thorough in her search, she plunged her head in to check.

"Hey Pinkie!" Applejack called. She had a raised voice to keep above the sound of the open steam vents, but her half-smile demonstrated no real hostility. "Hey Pinkie, we want to ask you a question! Right, Derpy?"

"Right?" Derpy asked, turning her head to check her right side. That got her face a few centimeters away from a steam port just as it went off, spraying her dead on.

"If they find what they're looking for out there," Applejack asked, "does that mean we get full shares?"

Pinkie Pie planted her hooves against the wall and pushed as hard as she could to extract her head from the dirty vent. Eventually her noggin popped loose and she slide backwards into the opposite wall. Her face was coated with the black gunk that had been all over the insides of the vent, and some of it had even encrusted onto her hair. "Aw, don't worry Applejack!" she reassured her friend, "When we find that cake, you'll get whatever's coming to you!"

Dropping some of her cheer, Applejack said "Look, I ain't going to do any more work until we get this straightened out." She was half-serious. They had been trying hard to get equal pay to the rest of the crew for awhile now, but she really didn't have any incentive or desire to stay on this barren rock of a planetoid.

"Applejack," Pinkie Pie responded, "I'll guarantee you that if we don't find the cake I'll still share my ice cream with you."

"What?" Applejack yelled, partly to overcome the steam, partly in confusion, and partly because she should have known better than to try and discuss this with Pinkie Pie.

The excited pink pony bounced up and down. "Oh, I brought along strawberry, and chocolate, and minty caramel! Yum!" She licked her lips but she didn't seem to notice that she caught quite a bit of her face grime with the maneuver. "And also butternut squash surprise. Oh! And DOUBLE vanilla. And-"

Applejack just shook her head, stupefied.

Derpy emerged out of the steamy fog with a swollen, beet-red face and puffy, teary eyes. "What'd you say, Pinkie?" she asked, unsure if she had heard her favorite flavor of butternut muffin mentioned in the list.

Pinkie Pie started to walk away, seemingly having changed her mind about her search. It wasn't proving fruitful, and now that she had gotten her ice cream supply on her mind... the cake just didn't seem worth it. "If you have any trouble," she shouted back to them, "I'll be having ice cream on the bridge!" She trotted off towards the ladder to the upper decks.

Frustrated, Applejack blew some air out of the side of her mouth and idly cranked down a steam valve, shutting off some of the venting pipes in the area.

"What's the matter?" Derpy turned and asked her. "Don't you like some of those flavors?"

The chief engineer gave her partner a hard stare and then reached for another valve. Giving it a spin, a fresh steam vent ignited, blasting Derpy in the face again.

* * *

Across the surface of the planetoid, the trio of pressure-suited ponies were continuing their trek, tracking down the source of the unknown signal. The landscape was rough-hewn, with numerous crevices and small trenches carving their way through the hard ground. Not to mention a few tall spires of rocks and several craters that dotted the area. The away team was able to keep partially out of the storm by sticking to some of the low trenches, but it didn't spare them from the thick fog.

"I can't see a thing, my hooves are sore, and I can literally feel this sweaty, recycled air spoiling my delicate curls!" Rarity whined desperately. "Do you have any idea how long this will take to smooth out?"

"Quit griping," Rainbow Dash told her. The captain was beginning to regret her team selection.

Rarity took on a defiant tone. "I like griping," she said.

"Just knock it off and come on!" Rainbow Dash yelled, getting behind her again and shoving her along to speed things up.

Up ahead it looked like the storm might be letting up, or at least it could be moving on away from their position. Maybe they would be able to get a good look at the surrounding landscape, or possibly the source of the transmission they were tracking...

* * *

Pinkie Pie stood on the Nomastromo's bridge with a fresh face and clean hair. However, she was looking disappointingly out the window at the storm. The only other presence with her was Opalescence, the ship's cat, who sat lazily on the floor batting a mouse toy back and forth.

The depressed pony heaved a sigh and took a sip of a drink she had poured for herself. She hadn't found any cake, and now when she had checked the kitchen for her ice cream she couldn't find that either. Surely she had misplaced it, but the doubly disappointed pony had trouble working past her sad lethargy to begin searching again.

After many minutes of wallowing in her self-pity, she wandered over to a work station and turned on the comm unit to the remote team monitoring bay. "Hey, Twilight..." she greeted with an unusual lack of bounce in her voice. "How's it going?"

Over the comm, she could hear the surprise in Twilight's voice. "Oh. Alright," the unicorn answered.

"Have you seen my ice cream anywhere?" Pinkie Pie asked.

"What? No, I haven't."

"Ohhh..." Pinkie Pie mumbled.

"Look," Twilight said while letting go of a large breath, "I'm very busy here, Pinkie. Why don't you try decoding that transmission to take your mind off things?"

Pinkie Pie cracked a small smile. "You mean like playing it backwards to listen for hidden messages?"

"Sure, whatever," Twilight acknowledged, and shut off her comm.

The pink pony's mood started to pick up a little bit, and she likewise turned off her comm before wondering over to Twilight's usual bridge station. Putting on the headset there, she sat down and pressed several buttons. Before long she was banging her head along to the overly rich soundscape which crashed down like an avalanche through her earpiece.

* * *

Rainbow Dash flapped her wings fast and firmly in order to float up to the edge of the small canyon she and her group were working their way through, looking for a chance to survey their surroundings. Lift and control were a bit more difficult while wearing the unwieldy pressure suit, but she was pony enough to manage.

The storm had cleared up to the point that there was some reasonable distance visibility. The sun of the planetoid could finally be seen, but it was so far away and weak it resembled no more than a small spotlight in the sky. Not all of the fog had blown off, leaving an eerie coating of mist on the surface.

Fluttershy struggled to lift herself up with her wings and Rarity had to claw her way dangerously up the least steep part of the canyon wall, wheezing forcefully when she finally made it to the top. They looked at Rainbow Dash, but their captain had stopped her survey and was staring off into the distance. Following her gaze themselves, they simultaneously gasped at what they saw.

Only a few hundred meters out sat an incredibly strange sight. It contrasted instantly against the rocky landscape, though somehow its wicked arches seemed to have an equally gnarled structure. The lack of symmetry in design gave it an uncomfortable appearance, and the massive, seemingly vein-covered wings or legs of it curved up towards the sky menacingly. It was a derelict ship, definitely not pony in origin, crashed and partially buried in the surface of this random planetoid.

For a moment, all three ponies stood watching it breathlessly, before finally a stunned Rainbow Dash spoke into her suit radio. "Twilight," she called in awe, "can you see this?"

All the way back at the Nomastromo, in her bubble, Twilight was staring at her monitors, equally mesmerized. Her signal to the others had degraded a bit, the images now being less fuzzy and distinct than they already were to start with, and the voices coming in were occasionally interrupted by pops of static. But she was still getting enough to be hypnotized.

"Yes, I can," she murmured in complete wonderment. "I've never seen anything like it..."

"Yeah, well," Rainbow Dash answered unsurely, "it's the stupidest looking thing I've ever seen."

"What IS it?" Fluttershy questioned, before quickly deciding that she didn't want to know. Turning to Rainbow Dash, she begged, "Oh, let's get out of here."

Twilight's shouts came through their radios, a mix of excitement, encouragement, and garbled static. "You've gone this far," she told them. "You must go on! You have to go on!"

"Oh, must we?" Rarity balked, expressing some rising fear.

Inside her helmet, Rainbow Dash breathed heavily, mild condensation building on the visor. At last she decided, "Alright. I think we should head over there."

Rarity said bleakly, "Oh... I suppose it's too much to hope it's some kind of off-world spa or resort?"

The three began making their way forward, descending the hill in front of them. "Twilight," Rainbow Dash reported, "if you can hear this, we're moving in closer."

At her bubble, Twilight didn't quite receive the message. The static had broken up most of it. To her observation, it seemed as if each step closer to the source they took, the more her signal degraded. She was steadily losing audio and visual contact with the team. Perhaps it was the transmission from the alien derelict? It's signal could have been so powerful it was drowning out others close to it, in the way only industrial techno could.

"Will you say that again?" she asked. But no response came through. She sighed regretfully and turned her focus to her control board, doing whatever she could to boost her signal.

Sliding down hills, crawling through trenches, and climbing over mounds, the away team inched closer to the derelict. They passed under one of the bizarre wing-legs of the ship, working their way around to the central base which was partially embedded in the rock. When they finally reached it, they found three ports on the side, low to the ground. They were wide and gaping, having a slight teardrop shape. Small hoods were over the top of them and there were stretched, vulvic folds which ran down the sides, causing the holes in every way to resemble... some kind of completely G-rated exhaust port.

On Twilight's board, her efforts to boost her signal were only fighting the inevitable, and all her screens and channels eventually turned to static. "Rainbow Dash?" she spoke into the comm hopelessly. "Rainbow?"

The buzz of the static echoed bare traces of the captain's voice, but there was no way to tell if she was receiving or acknowledging anything.

* * *

The sounds of the surface: light winds, miniature volcanic vents, and the occasional tumbling rock, faded into nothingness when the exploring ponies stepped inside of the derelict ship. Amping up their headlamps, the three walked slowly, step by step, through the interior of the ship. Some moved more trepidatiously than others, being frightened at the solitary sounds of their own clops and the occasional puff of their suits' air system. Those noises stood out like thunder against the dead sonic backdrop of the interior.

The architecture inside the ship was no less alien than the outside. What were recognizable as pipes could occasionally be seen zigging their way along the walls, but for the most part everything resembled twisted bone with some kind of solid and scaly material in between, connecting everything. There were metal parts, perhaps supports or unusually designed circuitry, which seemed jammed in at random places. Everything had a rotted green color, including the more metallic parts, and the walls were somewhat slick from a strange moisture that hung the thin air, despite the excessively dry atmosphere outside.

"Come on down here," Rarity called to the others. She had been forced ahead by Rainbow Dash, and now she stood at the entrance to a larger room. Some kind of tremendous, raised platform stood in the center, towering over her. "There's something different down here! I don't know what it is... but if we can get up that wall..."

Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy came over to her, looking up at the tall, grand chamber. It was incredibly more broad and sweeping than any of the tunnels they had been in so far. Most of the winding corridors just seemed to end, so this central chamber was probably the best way forward.

Rarity stepped aside to allow her crewmates access up. However, they just looked at each other for a moment before turning back to Rarity.

"You first," Rainbow Dash said.

"You two have WINGS!" Rarity violently asserted.

The two pegasi again exchanged stares before looking back at Rarity.

"You first," Rainbow Dash repeated.

Nervously whining, Rarity turned around and looked up the side of the platform. She swallowed once and put an unsteady hoof onto a thin edge in the wall's lattice-like structure and started to drag herself up. Straining, she brought all the foreleg strength which she really didn't even have to bear and hauled her pressure suit's bulk up towards the top. She ascended at a painfully slow pace, meter by meter. By the time she had gotten her front hooves over the edge of the top, she was sweating profusely within her helmet and her mane was a wreck. She barely had time to catch her breath when she glimpsed something ahead of her, and she gasped.

Behind her, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy gently floated up, passed over her, and touched down on the platform. "Woah..." Rainbow Dash uttered.

Secured in the center of the platform was some kind of large, technological, chair-like structure, only far more massive than any pony-sized chair. Additionally, the base was built in quite a pod-like way, completely enveloping the lower half of whatever was sitting in it. It was made of the same green, rotted metalwork found elsewhere in the ship. Attached to the front, a large metallic arm hooked out and supported some sort of elongated control device... perhaps a navigation aid, and this was the pilot's chair?

Most disturbing of all was what sat in the chair. Though "sat" might be a little generous, as whatever it was seemed more like it was surgically (or otherwise) grafted to its seat. Large stretches of former skin and bone reached from the thing's back into the chair itself. The entirety of its remains were bony and skeletal... a creature of mammoth proportions. It had lengthy arms and an odd, bulb-shaped skull with an unusual tube running out of where its nose should have been... assuming that wasn't the thing's nose to begin with.

Whatever this... space jockey... was, it had long since fossilized after its death. The alien derelict must have crashed on this rock a very long time ago.

Rarity kicked her legs wildly while trying to pull herself up the rest of the way. "A little assistance, if you don't mind," she asked the others. But they were too caught up in what they were seeing and walked over to the chair-creature, inspecting it. Eventually Rarity was able to swing her hind legs up, and she tumbled over onto the platform floor, panting.

"An alien life form..." Rainbow Dash whispered to herself. She floated up to the deceased creature's face, looking it over carefully. With a light touch, she tapped it once, causing the small section she touched to crumble to dust. "Looks dead to me," the pegasus noted.

Fluttershy had been lagging slightly behind Rainbow Dash, but she got a tiny bit closer at the news. She poked her head around her captain and took a peek for herself while her teeth chattered anxiously.

Rainbow Dash hovered about, trying to figure what she was looking at, or why it was physically attached to its own chair. The places where bone met metal were nearly seamless. "Geez... it's like it has a chair FOR a butt," she commented, baffled. Looking near the face again, she noticed that the creature had a sizable hole in its rib cage.

"Oh... the bones are bent outwards," Fluttershy observed, getting a little bit closer. "It's like he exploded from the inside."

"Yeah, Fluttershy," Rainbow Dash said in a sarcastic tone while turning to look at the frightened pegasus. "He swallowed a bomb or a bug and it just BURST out of his chest."

"R-r-really? D-d-d-do y-you t-t-think-" Fluttershy stammered uncontrollably in fright while she drifted backwards.

Sighing, Rainbow Dash grouchily told her, "No. Of course not. That's dumb. Clearly this thing was... you know... stabbed or shot from behind. Pfft. Swallowed a bug... puh-lease."

"O-oh..." Fluttershy let out, but she didn't feel any more relieved. Nervously glancing about, she said, "I w-wonder what happened t-to the rest of the c-crew?" But again she immediately decided that she'd rather not know and she begged Rainbow Dash, "Let's get out of here, please!"

Suddenly, Rarity called to them. "Rainbow Dash! Fluttershy! Come on over here!" She was leaning over some kind of grating in the platform floor.

The pegasi floated down to her, with Rainbow Dash stopping and turning back to catch one last eyeful of the quiet, dusty remains of the space jockey. "What do you got?" she asked Rarity after she had taken her final look.

Rarity directed their attention to what she was looking at and said, "What do you make of this?"


	3. Gather Specimen

Chapter 3: Gather Specimen

Pinkie Pie leaned back into the chair at Twilight's station, bored, but at least her preoccupation had taken her mind off the horrible lack of delicious treats. She stared at the monitor which was displaying Mother's progress in decoding the alien transmission. Seconds started turning into minutes. The feeling of passing time faded and the screen's pixels blurred, becoming a dancing set of lights and colors. Against the windows of the bridge, the winds of the softening storm seemed to hum a caressing lullaby.

Suddenly, she jumped in her seat, snapping awake. The tired pony yawned and looked around, uncertain of how long she had dozed off for. The lights of the monitor drew her back in and she shook off her drowsiness while she scrutinized the translation progress so far.

"Hmm..." she noted with curiosity. Pinkie Pie turned on a nearby comm unit and called for Twilight.

Inside her bubble, Twilight was also sitting down spiritlessly, her head propped up by her hooves. She gazed outwards, her eyes dry and unblinking, watching as the steady winds rolled the fog over the twisted rock formations of the surface. She always had one eye on the direction the others had taken off in, keeping a vigil and waiting for their return.

The sound of Pinkie Pie's voice startled her, and she haphazardly spun her chair back to the control console and switched on her comm. "Yes, Pinkie, what is it?" she asked.

"The transmission... Mother's deciphered part of it. It doesn't look like an SOS..." Pinkie Pie said ominously.

Twilight nervously glanced about. Almost harshly, she responded, "Well, what is it then?"

"I'm not sure. It's really unclear," Pinkie Pie glibly answered. The pink pony rubbed her chin while pouring over the display. On the monitor, a pixelated, makeshift gallows had been constructed, ready to execute a two-legged pony with missing facial feature. Below the image, the partially decoded transmission read:

**WA‒NING**  
**‒ASHED ON ‒N‒HA‒ED PLANE‒OID**  
**‒A‒GO IS VE‒Y HOS‒ILE, VE‒Y AGG‒ESSIVE, VE‒Y DEADLY O‒GANISMS**  
**S‒AY ‒HE F‒‒K AWAY O‒ YO‒ WILL ALL DIE**  
**EVE‒Y‒HING YO‒'VE EVE‒ LOVED WILL DIE**

"It could mean ANYTHING," Pinkie Pie mused out loud. After a moment she declared, "I'm going to go out after them."

Panic shot through Twilight's eyes. "What's the point?" she hastily spoke into the comm. "I mean... by the time it takes to get out there, they'll have already found out the meaning of the transmission, right?"

Pinkie Pie wasn't sure how she should take that reply. The breathing of the two ponies were the only noises that broke the long stretch of silence between them. Twilight finally decided to flick off her comm, convinced she had gotten through to her crewmate. She exhaled with relief and turned her chair to face out of the bubble again.

But then Pinkie Pie's voice came through once more. "Are you sure you haven't seen my ice cream? Because I looked all over for-"

Twilight twisted and jammed down a mute key. Once again, she went back to staring in a meditative way at the hellscape of the planetoid.

* * *

The portable winch was securely positioned and hooked into Rarity's suit. They placed the device right next to the decaying and broken grating that she had found. The large platform that the trio had climbed upon was actually hollow, having internal, vertical tunnels which trailed down into some unknown darkness. The unicorn hung over the open grate, ready to be lowered.

"But you have WINGS!" Rarity protested yet again.

"You first," Rainbow Dash casually insisted, and turned on the winch.

The device cranked steadily, and slowly it lowered the nervous pony down into the abyss. She kept her head down, looking about frantically. The glow of the headlamp on her helmet followed her vision, searching and scanning the ghastly walls of the shaft.

Over her suit radio, Rainbow Dash's voice came in. "Can you see anything?"

The shaft began to open up into something larger. "I don't... a... a cave, of some sort," Rarity answered. Each meter she dropped she could feel a sweltering humidity growing and it rubbed against her suit uncomfortably. It was a stark change from the dry cold of the planetoid surface. "Ugh... it's like the tropics down here," she whined. Some of her tattered mane collapsed over her eyes and she clawed at her helmet's visor recklessly, despairing at her cruel fate.

Like a curved funnel, the shaft flared out into a preposterously monstrous chamber. Rarity could hardly believe the size of the room; the derelict had seemed quite large on the outside, but not capable of holding a cavity this gargantuan. The walls rolled down into the floor in a smooth curve. The bottom of the room itself was divided into small, recessed pits by many large, raised, bony ridges. Each pit was coated by a laser-like field of glowing blue mist, emanating from a framework buried in the walls and corrugations of the chamber. The cerulean illumination was the only light aside from the unicorn's headlamp.

Rarity fortunately touched down on top of one of the ridges. "Alright, I've landed," she radioed to her crewmates. The winch stopped. "You can come on down now," she said.

"Uh..." Rainbow Dash's uncertain voice came back, filtered by the low quality of the radio transmission. "Why don't you check it out for now? We'll wait up here," she suggested. The line that connected to the winch went slack, allowing Rarity the freedom to move about.

"What? But I- ugh! Fine!" the frustrated unicorn sighed.

Carefully, she walked in tiny steps forward along the ridge and peered down through the thin, blue fog. It was hard to believe that whatever this was, it was still active after both the ship crashed and the crew had time to fossilize. Then she noticed something odd beneath the barrier. Many things, in fact. She realized that this curious mist wasn't just for lighting and decoration.

"The area... is pocketed with small recessions," she reported to the others, "and they're full of... leathery objects. Eggs, or something." She stopped her movement and bent down, reaching a hoof out towards the strange, blue field delicately. As her hoof got closer to the barrier, the mist itself began to produce a whining, raised pitch. She moved her hoof about, taking it a little further away, a little closer, and the strength of the noise corresponded to how close she was to the mist. Trembling, she very cautiously pushed her hoof through.

The sound reached its peak, but otherwise nothing else seemed to happen. Into her radio, Rarity said, "There's a layer of mist just covering the eggs that reacts when brok-!"

Her balance teetered from leaning forwards too far and she tumbled down into the pit with a yelp. The noise from the blue field screeched for a moment more before abruptly stopping.

"Rarity? You alright?" Rainbow Dash asked with some concern.

"I'm okay," Rarity insisted, getting to her hooves. She gazed around. Nothing seemed disturbed, though the egg-like objects looked even larger and more coriaceous up close, without the distraction of the barrier in the way. They were nearly a meter tall, bigger than any egg she had ever seen in her life. "I'm alright, I just slipped," she informed the others.

Now that she was down in the pit anyway, she decided to get a closer look at one of the eggs and stalked towards the nearest one. Although the surface appeared thick and hardened, there was a softer spot at the top, almost like it was loosely cracked there. She looked over at some of the other eggs and saw that they were identical; the strange tip was obviously part of the design rather than some incident which had befallen this egg in particular. Still, she was unnerved by its foreign nature. Disturbingly, the egg had some kind of dark, thick moisture coming from it. The sickly drops traced a path around the rough contours of the object's surface, not quite seeming to obey normal gravity as they did so. It was like the egg was... sweating.

"Eugh... disgusting looking thing," Rarity complained to herself, sticking out her tongue. She was sure if her suit wasn't sealed it would be the most hideously foul smelling thing to ever reach her nose. Worse than Applejack after spending the day wallowing in a pig pen.

Leaning forward, she tried to avoid getting too close as she began to bring her head over the top of the egg's unusual peak. She wanted a clearer look at it, but no sooner had she gotten her head in place did the egg emit a sharp, rasping hiss. Rarity leapt backwards, scrambling and kicking across the floor until she crashed into the ridge behind her. Fearfully she watched the egg, catching her breath, but nothing more seemed to happen and there was only silence.

Composing herself, she got to her hooves again and stepped forward, pausing suddenly when she noticed the egg seemed to be changing slightly. Its sweat thickened, and more was being produced. There was a light, fluttering noise coming from inside it, and the whole shape of the egg pulsed slightly... as if it were breathing. She focused her headlamp onto the egg more directly, and she could see tiny pushes coming from the inside like an unborn baby kicking in the womb. "I think," she said quietly, shuddering, "that these eggs are still unspoiled... there's movement..."

She was distracted by the top of the egg, which unexpectedly began beating rhythmically like a heart. Frightened, she watched for several moments before deciding to get closer. But she only had taken a single step when the top of the egg started to push open with a squishy, wet creak, and she backed up into the ridge again. The egg did indeed have separate folds on top; four of them. They opened smoothly and uniformly like the mandibles of a hungry insect.

From her cowering position, Rarity couldn't see the now exposed insides of the egg. However, silence and stillness seemed to befell the area again, so she calmed herself down and stood back up. Daring to edge closer, she took very slow and deliberate steps towards the egg, pausing to watch it with every clop forward she made. At last, she was close enough to get a clean glimpse. She swallowed once and raised her head up.

The inside of the egg wasn't housing some alien critter, but instead it seemed to be filled to the brim by some kind of grotesque and fleshy tissue. Pink slime coated everything and ligaments were stretched from here to there, a spiderweb of pulsating sinew. Prominently in the center was some kind of sac or organ which bubbled with activity. It gurgled with a malignant rumble and twitched with subtle spasms.

On top of the platform, by the winch, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy heard Rarity's piercing shriek through their radios. Desperate gulps and gasps for air followed, immediately trailed by a disgusting, wheezing noise.

"Rarity?" Rainbow Dash asked, alarmed. "Rarity!"

The sound of a breathless heaving suddenly came through the radio and they heard her voice again. Horrified, she yelled, "I'm going to vomit inside of my suit!" Her cheeks were puffed out and her lips braced tightly, fighting valiantly to contain the contents of her stomach. When she would stop to take a quick breath, she felt the rising tide of acid again and clenched down, struggling to keep it in.

Her predicament wasn't helped by Rainbow Dash's enthused response of, "Awesome!"

Getting herself under control, she began to feel the unstable sickness pass and took several big breaths. Staggering about from the lingering wooziness, she angrily snapped into her radio, "Rainbow Dash, when we get back... I swear to Celestia that I am going to take the nastiest thing I can get my hooves on and shove it straight down your throa-"

In her unattended stumbling, she bumped back into the egg. When see turned to look, the beating organ inside burst in a shower of guts and sticky mucus. A small creature with many legs and a long tail shot out with a shrill squeal, clamping to the visor of Rarity's helmet. She fell over in shock, kicking about on the floor wordlessly, hearing only the cry of the creature and another sizzling sound it was producing. Her thrashing came to sudden stop and her body laid motionless on the floor of the gigantic chamber.

Rainbow Dash's voice coming through the radio broke the long, dead silence. "Rarity? Rarity? Haha, you puked all over your helmet, didn't you? ... Rarity?"

* * *

Twilight was still staring out of her bubble when she saw them. She sat up and squinted to verify. The storm was still present around the Nomastromo, fog and all, even if it had weakened over time. But she was certain. She could make out the distinct outline of their pony pressure suits and the flare from their headlamps. Something clearly wasn't right, however. Instead of three silhouettes trotting back towards the ship, they looked like one mixed blob. As they got closer, Twilight realized that one them appeared injured and was being carried by the others.

Rainbow Dash had Rarity slung over her back as she pushed forward with determination. A frantic Fluttershy floated just above them, gripping one of Rarity's dangling limbs with both her forelegs, but the pegasus barely succeeded at holding the weight up on her own. The two ponies hauled their downed crewmate all the way to the lift at the base of the Nomastromo and set her down on it. Bringing the lift up, they dragged her into the airlock and shut it, beginning the repressurization process.

Flipping on the comm in the airlock, Rainbow Dash shouted, "You there, Pinkie Pie?" She was agitated, yelling to both give herself focus and overcome the machinery that was rapidly and noisily purging the tiny room.

On the bridge of the ship, Pinkie Pie overheard the shout and ran over to some nearby controls. Switching on her comm and tuning a monitor to the airlock camera, she cheerily answered, "I'm right here!"

The airlock finished the purge cycle and began matching the chamber's atmosphere to the ship's. Just outside of the inner hatch, Twilight came running over and turned on the comm there. "Okay, Pinkie, I'm at the inner lock hatch now," she said.

"Right," Pinkie Pie confirmed.

"Hey, Pinkie," Rainbow Dash called in as the airlock repressurization finished. "We're clean. Let us in."

Pinkie Pie looked suspiciously over her monitor. Rarity was sprawled on the floor and something was wrong with her helmet, though the grainy video wasn't distinct enough to determine what. "What happened to Rarity?" the pink pony asked. "She didn't blow chunks in her suit, did she?"

Distracted and anxious, Rainbow Dash replied, "I wish. Look, something has attached itself to her. We have to get her to the infirmary right away."

"Oooooo! What kind of thing? I want a clear description!" Pinkie Pie said with excited curiosity.

"An organism! Open the hatch!" Rainbow Dash bellowed, frustrated by the stalling.

"An orga-what?" Pinkie Pie replied. "Wait a minute, are you tracking bugs onto our clean ship?"

Growing angry, Rainbow Dash cried into the comm, "Rarity could DIE if we don't get her inside, now open the hatch!"

But Pinkie Pie sounded unconvinced. "You know the company rules," she told her captain, "no uninvited guests without approval by an authorized superior."

"I am your superior!" Rainbow Dash roared.

"When the captain goes off ship, the first officer is put in charge," Pinkie Pie genially explained. "I'm going to have to ask Rarity if this is okay."

Fluttershy came on the comm, obviously crying and distraught, hardly able to keep herself together. "Rarity's unconscious! Would you please open the hatch?" she begged. "We have to get her inside!"

"If Rarity's out of commission, that means authority goes to the third officer," Pinkie Pie started to explain before getting thrilled and clasping her hooves together. "That's me! I'm in charge!" she shouted ecstatically.

"OPEN THE HATCH, PINKIE PIE!" Rainbow Dash yelled, only centimeters away from the comm panel.

"Well, if you're going to be like that," the pink pony defiantly said, "then, as acting captain, I'm not going to let you back in. So hmph!"

Trying to bring herself back under control, Rainbow Dash sternly said "Pinkie, this is an order." She was barely able to keep her temper in check. "Open that hatch right now. Do you hear me?"

"Yup," Pinkie Pie responded brightly.

Rainbow Dash watched the airlock door, but it still didn't open. Furious, she screamed into the comm, "Pinkie, this is AN ORDER! YOU HEAR ME?"

Mildly offended, Pinkie Pie replied, "Yup, I hear you, Mrs. Grumpy Dash. But now I can't!" She shoved her hooves into her ears and began singing obnoxiously, "La lala la la lalala!"

The irate pegasus slammed a hoof into the comm panel, nearly breaking it. She was getting prepared to try and bust down the airlock door when suddenly it slid open. Twilight had hit the hatch controls, letting them back into the ship.

* * *

They brought Rarity to the top deck of the ship, where the infirmary was located. She laid on a raised cot in the middle of the room and her pressure suit had been almost completely taken off by the other ponies. Only her helmet remained in place. The unknown creature had somehow burned its way through her visor and squeezed itself inside of her helmet. Its spinal ridges were still sticking out of the hole it had left. They wouldn't be able to pull the helmet off with that thing there.

Rainbow Dash and Twilight were in the infirmary as well, dressed in medical smocks and wearing simplistic face masks to protect themselves from anything airborne that they could be exposed to. Standing just outside the sealed door of the room was Fluttershy, Applejack, and Derpy, all of whom watched through the observation window with tremendous concern.

Twilight magically used a small laser-cutter to carefully bisect Rarity's helmet, having determined that that was the only safe way to remove it. The limited beam produced by the cutting device screeched in a high pitched tone as it easily sliced through the metal work of the helmet. When the magic officer had made the final cut, she set the tool aside and enveloped the whole helmet with her magic. With tiny vibrations, it wiggled and shook as she kept adding more and more force until it cracked in half.

The two halves pulled apart and everypony was given a glimpse of Rarity's horrible condition. A small alien creature was tightly clutching on to her face, smothering her. It had a relatively flat and featureless body except for the visible ridges of its spine, and its skin was a pale and putrid brown color. Eight long, finger-like legs reached out from its body and around Rarity's skull, holding the alien in place. The thing's lengthy tail curved down from its back and was wrapped around her neck threateningly. The only signs of life coming from the creature were the extreme tenacity with which it seemed to cling to its victim, and some small sacs that hung to its side and appeared to be respirating.

Besides all that, the time in the helmet had certainly done Rarity's mane no good. Frayed, tangled, and soaked in sweat, it was a hairdresser's nightmare.

"Dear Princess Celestia..." Rainbow Dash murmured to herself with a terrible dread. At both sights.

Passing by the infirmary hall, Pinkie Pie noticed the others gathered there and strode in, curious. "Hey, everypony!" she buoyantly greeted. "What're you doing?"

Not a single one of them acknowledged her, too captured by the gruesome sight within the infirmary.

Pinkie Pie followed their eyes through the observation window and titled her head, trying to figure out what was going on. "Uh..." she knocked on the glass twice, "Rarity! You've got a bug on your face!" she tried to inform her unconscious friend. "It's right... here!" The absent-minded pony stuffed one of her hooves square into her own face to demonstrate.

Twilight walked around the cot, inspecting the creature from several angles. Everything about it fascinated her.

"How're we gonna get that off her?" Rainbow Dash asked.

There was no response from the purple unicorn. She was too absorbed in study.

"How're we gonna get it off?" Rainbow Dash repeated sharply.

Twilight shook back to attention but held up a hoof to her captain. "Just a minute, just a minute..." she said. While she studied the legs of the creature closely, her horn lit up and a nearby medical toolkit opened. A pair of tongs floated out and over to her. "Right... I'm going to try and remove one of the digitals from her face," Twilight determined.

"You're going to do WHAT?" Rainbow Dash asked in stark confusion.

"Finger," Twilight simplified. "Going to try and get his finger off."

"You're going to do WHAT?" the captain said again.

Uncertain, Twilight juggled about some words in her head before settling on, "Going to try and get... one of his legs off. Now, just a minute."

Meticulously, she leveled the tongs in place around one of the many legs gripping Rarity. Steadily she applied pressure and began to gently pull at it.

The face-hugging creature immediately responded by further tightening its tail, clamping down on the poor unicorn's neck. The muscles in the aliens' legs seized up with an astonishing amount of strength, and they dug in to Rarity's skin.

"Wicked! It's tearing her face off!" Rainbow Dash said, thoroughly impressed. She shook her head briskly and shouted to Twilight, "I mean... no! Stop!"

Twilight hadn't missed the threat to Rarity either and released her grip with the tongs. The creature stayed tensed up for a few seconds before relaxing back into a more neutral position.

"It's not coming off without tearing her face off with it," Rainbow Dash noted, making a small aside, "Heh. Awesome." She shook her head again and asked Twilight, "What're we going to do?"

Setting down her tongs, the ruminative unicorn thought for a moment. "We'll have to take a look at her insides," she suggested. She hit several switches on a control board nearby and a glass panel on the wall slid up, revealing a slot for detailed patient analysis. The cot holding Rarity slowly began moving, and shifted into the analysis chamber.

Applejack looked severely worried and turned to the other spectators. "How come they don't freeze her?" she asked. Nopony had a clear response, so she shouted through the observation window instead, "Hey, how come ya'll don't freeze her?"

The cot finished moving into position and the glass panel shut, sealing the chamber. "Alright, you can take your mask off," Twilight informed the captain while magically moving her mask down around her neck. Rainbow Dash complied and pulled hers down as well.

The chamber's scanner rolled up and down, casting a light along Rarity's body. After several passes, various images and detailed readings began showing up on the monitors just above the chamber. The incapacitated unicorn's vitals were alright and at values which would be expected for an unconscious pony. Aside from the strain on her skin from the recent removal attempt, there was no bodily damage done to her. Whatever that thing had done to bore through her helmet, it had been careful enough not to harm her. From a multilayered x-ray image on one monitor, it could be seen that the intruder was up to something with Rarity's mouth, however.

"What's it got down her throat?" Rainbow Dash asked, troubled.

"Considering it got lucky enough to bag Rarity," Twilight conjectured, "I would suggest that's its genitals."

Rainbow Dash reared back in surprise. "That is DARK, Twilight," she told her friend frankly.

Hastily Twilight made a second guess, "Maybe it's feeding her oxygen."

"Paralyzes her... puts her in a coma... and keeps her alive," Rainbow Dash mused out loud. "Now what sort of thing does that?"

Still examining the readings, Twilight didn't even break her stare to succinctly reply, "Parasite."

"It's like... is there any sort of animal that even-" Rainbow Dash continued.

"Parasite," Twilight said a second time, with more emphasis.

"That even... does anything remotely like that?"

Twilight looked straight at Rainbow Dash and yelled with exasperation, "It's a parasite!"

"Well, whatever it is, we gotta get it off her," the captain commanded with authority.

"Just a minute, just a minute," Twilight replied, studying the monitors again. She had a hard time looking away, spellbound as she was by the interesting traits this creature displayed. "I mean, let's not be too hasty. We don't know anything about... it. Now, we're assuming it's feeding her oxygen. If we remove it... it could kill her." She turned back to Rainbow Dash with accusing eyes.

Looking at Rarity once, the pegasus casually shrugged. "I'm willing to take the chance. Let's cut it off her now," she easily accepted.

"You'll take responsibility?" Twilight asked.

"Yeah, sure, whatever," Rainbow Dash agreed.

Both ponies reapplied their masks as the analysis chamber reopened and Rarity's cot swung back out into the center of the infirmary. Twilight went and gathered what tools she would need, preparing a tray. In the observation area, everypony stood or sat quietly and watched the proceedings, either worrying or praying. Throughout it all, the alien stayed still, silent, and menacing, clasped to Rarity's face.

When all the tools were prepared, Rainbow Dash asked, "Where do you want to do this?"

"I'll make an incision just below the knuckle there," Twilight said, pointing towards the precise location. She leveled a laser-scalpel over the target and hovered a piece of gauze just below the site. "Stand by," she murmured as she switched on the scalpel. The end of the tool glowed green and hummed with a sharp whine. Slowly, Twilight brought it in and the beam edged closer and closer to the alien's leg...

When it finally connected to the creature's limb, the sudden slice spilled a vile, olive liquid which poured like a weak faucet. It wasn't nearly as coagulable as would be expected for blood. Twilight instinctively pressed the gauze against the wound, but the fabric immediately began sizzling and burning. A stream of white smoke filtered off its quickly disintegrating remains. The liquid that pooled on the floor had the same effect, rapidly dissolving and eating through the surface.

"Starswirl's beard!" Twilight exclaimed as she withdrew the scalpel and threw down what was left of the gauze.

"That crap's going to eat through the hull!" Rainbow Dash realized, and she charged out of the room in a fervor while throwing off her mask. As she passed the bystanders she yelled, "It's going to eat through the hull, come on!"

"Who's eating what now?" Derpy inquired before getting dragged along by Applejack.

Rainbow Dash dove down the ladder to B deck and raced to the room below the infirmary, stopping at the door. Eyes to the ceiling, she poked her head in cautiously to avoid getting dripped on by the dangerous acid. She hadn't caught sight of anything when an inattentive Pinkie Pie crashed into her from behind, followed swiftly by Derpy and then even Applejack. The ball of ponies rolled into the room and broke apart, equine debris being scattered about. The captain's nose landed mere centimeters from a pool of acid. The drip had chewed through the ceiling, eaten through a heavy pair of pressure suit boots, and was already starting on the floor. Rainbow Dash sprang to her hooves and shouted in a panic, "Next deck!"

All the ponies recovered and jumped down to C deck, the last deck of the ship before the corrosive acid would began burning a hole into the plated hull and exposing the inside of the Nomastromo to the vacuum of space. Upon arriving below where the acid should have been, Rainbow Dash didn't see anything. She fiercely ordered the others to spread out and search, but they had hardly gotten anywhere when Applejack heard a hissing noise.

"There it is!" she pointed out, and she kicked a bunch of expendable garbage off of a nearby table. Quickly, she slid the waste under the hole beginning to form in the ceiling.

The ceiling melted weakly, with drops of the soft, metallic remains tearing off and splashing against Applejack's junk pile on the floor. The cavity that the acid created just wasn't as large as the others on the previous decks, nor was the same corrosive speed present anymore.

"Don't get under it! Don't get under it!" Applejack cautioned the other ponies as they approached and directed them around the hazard.

"Looks like it's stopping," Pinkie Pie commented.

"Derpy, give me... what do you got? You got a pen there?" Rainbow Dash asked the klutzy pony. "Give it to me, quick."

Hesitating, Derpy pulled a silver pen out of her shirt pocket. The captain's aggressive urges to hurry up startled her and she held it out for Rainbow Dash to take.

Grabbing the pen in her teeth, the cyan pegasus hovered up to the ceiling and pushed the pen into the hole, which still frizzled with a small amount of activity.

"Don't get any on your face!" Applejack warned.

But with getting a close look at the damage, Rainbow Dash was confident. She extracted the pen. The end burned, with traces of smoke lifting off of it, but it had barely melted in the exposure to the dying acid. "It stopped..." Rainbow Dash said. "I haven't seen anything like that, except... magic acid."

"Magic acid?" Derpy questioned.

Glowering, Rainbow Dash responded caustically, "Yeah, Derpy. It can just use regular, run-of-the-mill, super acid for blood and not have a problem wi-OF COURSE it's magic!"

"It's got a wonderful defense mechanism," Applejack observed wryly, "You don't dare kill it."

"What about Rarity?" Pinkie Pie wondered.

"What ABOUT Rarity?" Rainbow Dash replied before she sighed at the sheer insanity of this whole situation. She held the pen back out for Derpy and said idly, "Here's your pen back."

Derpy reached over and bit onto the pen, burning her tongue in the process. She spit out the hot tool and bounced around in pain, wildly waving her tongue in the air.

"What do we do now?" Applejack wondered.

Frustrated, Rainbow Dash stormed off with Pinkie Pie in toe and told the engineer, "Leave Rarity to Twilight and get back to work."

Applejack watched them go, uncertain how she could focus on her work with everything that had gone on. Derpy approached her and encouragingly said, "I gueth thee thould get bath to therth."


	4. Insure Return of Organism

Chapter 4: Insure Return of Organism

Repeated sparks fired from the nozzle of Derpy's welding torch while she repaired some of the broken cells from the load sharing unit. Each flash bathed the dingy and dim room with a blinding aura of light. Coming in rapid bursts, the pulses of light stiffly bounced off the pegasus' heavy welding helmet. Applejack kept her head turned partially away, squinting her eyes and keeping them blocked from the dangerous rays with a raised hoof.

After one last spark, Derpy finished up. Pushing the torch aside, she glumly told Applejack, "Okay. Try it."

Applejack turned a knob and activated the equipment. The machine lit up and its many parts moved about, but in short order they started to grind together. The interlinking units coughed and wheezed in a sore manner as they struggled to shift positions. It would have been obvious to even a laypony that the equipment was not the least bit healthy.

Sighing, Applejack shut it off. "Darn. Thought for sure that was it," she quietly complained.

"I didn't see anything!" Derpy squawked, and she threw her head about, searching for activity.

Reaching over, Applejack pushed up Derpy's welding helmet. Then she restarted the machine to demonstrate its malfunction with another round of chugging, abrasive noises.

"Oh," Derpy moaned. Disappointed, she looked down at the work she had been doing. The enthusiasm to continue was hardly present. They weren't home, they weren't even serenely floating through space, and they had been at these repairs for hours. All the while the dark specter of Rarity's condition haunted the back of their minds. A vivid image of the alien creature attached to her, choking the life out of her. "I feel like we've been in this place for a month," Derpy said and grabbed the welding torch once more, firing it up. She aimed it at the next cell.

Applejack grabbed the torch from Derpy, flipped her helmet down for her, and handed it back before turning away to shield her eyes. "We shouldn't have landed here in the first place. This place give me the creeps," she concurred. There were several blasts from Derpy's torch and the lifeless silence started to take over again. Trying to inject some positivity into the dull and hopeless air, Applejack said "I reckon the sooner we patch things up and get out of here, the sooner we can go home."

* * *

Most of the lights were down in the infirmary except for those Twilight kept on by her workstation. She had a microscope set up with prepared samples scraped from the alien creature, and several monitors buzzed with information she had compiled in her ceaseless study of it. Going back and forth between the microscope and the workstation, she silently and single-mindedly continued her research, unperturbed by Rarity's still unconscious form laying only a few meters away.

"Hi!" Pinkie Pie yelped.

"Gah!" Twilight stumbled in shock from the sudden shattering of the room's soft stillness. She nearly stabbed her eyes out on the eyepieces of the microscope.

Taking in the images and charts on the monitors, Pinkie Pie voiced in awe, "That's amazing, Twilight! ... What is it?"

Collecting herself, Twilight curtly replied, "Why, yes it is. Um... I don't know yet." She hit a switch and all the monitors blinked off simultaneously. Facing the intruder with a dissatisfied look, she stretched herself once before she asked, "Did you want something, Pinkie?"

"Yeah!" the pink pony said eagerly. "I wanted to have a little talk!" She happily moved in and sat down across from Twilight.

Dismissive, Twilight floated a clipboard of notes and a pen over to herself and continued her work. With the bare minimum amount of attention, she asked her guest, "What did you want to talk about?"

"How's Rarity?" Pinkie Pie questioned.

"She's holding, no changes," Twilight answered, without even a glance away from her notes.

"And her new boyfriend?" Pinkie Pie continued.

Twilight didn't give a response. She just scribbled away at her notes.

"Hm?" Pinkie Pie uttered to try and encourage a reply.

"Well, as I said, I was still... collating actually..." Twilight idly responded. Her writing slowed down and she looked up from time to time as she divulged monotonously, "But I have confirmed that he's got an outer layer of protein polysaccharides. He has a funny habit of shedding his cells and replacing them with polarized silicon, which gives him a prolonged resistance to adverse environmental conditions." She gave a dry smile, hoping that the boring details would drive off her unwanted visitor. "Is that enough for-"

"What does this thingy do?" Pinkie Pie asked while she rolled as many knobs as she could on the microscope and peered down one of the eyepieces.

Twilight dropped her pen and clipboard loudly. "Please don't do that. Thank you," she said as she gently pushed the overly impulsive pony away from her delicate equipment.

"Sorry," Pinkie Pie sweetly apologized and went back to sitting with a vacant stare.

Slowly, Twilight picked up her clipboard and pen again. She jotted one note down, looked back at Pinkie Pie, then wrote something else... she was trying hard to forget the bothersome presence before her. But every time she tried to concentrate she couldn't shake off the pony's ignorant but contented stare and had to check on her again.

Suddenly, Pinkie Pie asked again, "... and her new boyfriend?"

The annoyed unicorn heaved a mighty sigh and set her notes down once more. "He has an interesting combination of elements that make him a tough little son-of-a-hitch," she summarized.

"Wow..." Pinkie Pie mumbled, seemingly captivated. However, she quickly fell into confusion a raised an innocent eyebrow. "I wonder how he got inside the ship?" she forgetfully mused.

Immediately Twilight got defensive and glanced about the room. "Wha-? I was obeying a direct order, remember?" she deflected.

"You were?" Pinkie Pie asked curiously.

Twilight rambled unconvincingly, unable to make eye contact as she did so, "Oh yes, I forgot, when Rainbow Dash and Rarity are off ship, you're in charge."

"You did? I am?" was the honest, perplexed reply.

"Are you insinuating that I forgot about the quarantine law?" Twilight unthinkingly shot back. She was beginning to sweat and she panted between sentences. "Well, that I didn't forget."

"You didn't?"

With a hostile stare, Twilight was at last able to look at Pinkie Pie directly in the eyes. "Look, what would you have done with Rarity? Hm?" she said bitingly. "You know her only chance of survival was to get her in here."

"It was?" Pinkie Pie asked.

Unable to maintain her hard glare, Twilight broke away and started pacing nervously while prattling on. She was still accusing in tone when she declared, "Maybe I should have left her outside. Maybe I've... jeopardized the rest of us. But it was a risk I was willing to take."

"Wow, Twilight," Pinkie Pie said with surprise. "That sounds like a pretty big risk to take for a magic officer," she admitted with a tangible amount of respect in her voice.

Sounding insulted, Twilight stressed with contention, "I do take my responsibilities as seriously as you, you know. You do your job, and let me do mine. Hm?"

"Oh. Okay!" Pinkie Pie merrily accepted. She got up and skipped out of the infirmary, humming a jaunty tune.

Twilight watched as the intruder left and then wiped the sweat from her brow. She gave out a breath of relief and started nervously cleaning up the microscope and her workstation. The tense encounter had left her feeling stiff though, and she had to stop to stretch again to keep from freezing up. She arced her back and spread out her pairs of limbs before she took a long drink from a glass of milky white liquid she had kept prepared on the side.

* * *

On B deck was the airlock connecting to the Nomastromo's emergency shuttle, the Narsurcingle. It was an incredibly small and tightly designed vessel with twin microfusion thrusters. They weren't nearly as capable of reaching the speeds the Nomastromo itself could go, making timely long-range interstellar travel with the shuttle unreasonable. But they did have enough kick to get the tiny ship out of the way of immediate dangers or to push it towards the nearest space-traffic lane with the hope that its SOS would be picked up by a passing ship.

Rainbow Dash, however, used the shuttle as a means of temporary escape. Without telling anypony where she was going, she ducked inside and shut the airlock door to seclude herself away from the problems of captaincy. She spent hours relaxing in the pilot's seat and jamming to some hardcore heavy metal music that she piped through the shuttle's speakers.

But it was only a three deck ship, so she couldn't stay hidden forever. All the music in space wasn't enough to drown out the droning beep of the comm signal when somepony finally wanted to contact her. Try as she did, she couldn't ignore its repetitive ringing.

Wearily, she tuned down the volume of her music and turned on the comm from her end. "You got the Dash," she tiredly affirmed.

Twilight's voice buzzed through, "I think you should have a look at Rarity."

"Why?" Rainbow Dash asked, hopeful to find a reason not to get up.

"Something's happened," Twilight cryptically answered.

"She didn't up and die, did she?" the captain moaned.

"No. Something much more interesting," Twilight said.

"MORE interesting?" Rainbow Dash replied, curious. She sat for a moment and thought through the enigmatic comments. Finally, with a sigh, she shut off the music completely and opened a new comm channel to the Nomastromo's bridge. "Pinkie, meet me in the infirmary right away," she commanded.

* * *

"More interesting, huh?" Rainbow Dash sardonically said to Twilight while she pointed a hoof through the observation window. "Where is it?"

Rarity still laid unconscious on the cot in the darkened infirmary, but the alien which had attached itself to her face was nowhere to be seen. Somehow, when nopony was looking, it had disconnected itself from her and vanished.

"I don't know..." Twilight replied, "but we ought to try and find it."

"Alright, yeah, let's check it," Rainbow Dash steadily agreed, and she opened the infirmary door.

The two ponies, accompanied by Pinkie Pie, carefully and alertly stepped into the doorway. They scanned the poorly lit room with their eyes, searching for any sign of movement. There weren't any indications of where the creature could have gone, so they eased inside the room and sealed the door behind themselves.

Rainbow Dash waved Twilight off to search the right side of the room while she herself briefly checked on Rarity and then went left. Pinkie Pie crept in behind the captain, looking under and around Rarity's cot. The unicorn was still unconscious, but she was breathing weakly under her own power. Her face was covered in red marks and dried slime, left behind from the alien's extended residency. That, coupled with her still worn and frayed mane, gave her the appearance of having survived a particularly nasty collision with a jellyfish vendor.

Not seeing anything herself, Pinkie Pie leaned over and whispered lightly into Rarity's ear, "Hey. Rarity? Have you seen your boyfriend around anywhere?" Predictably, there was no response from the comatose pony. Pinkie Pie rapped on the first officer's head a few times in a vain attempt to get her attention. Finally giving up, the pink pony shrugged her shoulders and started to move on before she suddenly remembered something and shot back to Rarity's side. "Hey... have you seen the ice cream anywhere?" she whispered.

Annoyed with the display of idiocy, Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes and intentionally kicked over a tray of medical tools, breaking the fragile silence with a rolling clatter. The startling noise made Pinkie Pie jump with a shriek but she quickly realized what happened and took the action in jest, giggling at the prank.

"Can we please be serious?" Twilight begged in a hushed tone. She collected two small prods which had lighted ends, meant for dissection, and passed one to Rainbow Dash so that they could check the thin cracks between equipment more safely. While she was raiding the dissection tools, she also grabbed a tray with high walls which could be used to trap the creature.

"How come I don't get a light stick?" Pinkie Pie wailed.

"Be quiet, Pinkie," Rainbow Dash chided in a whisper. "Just keep an eye on Rarity."

Disappointed but nonetheless faithful, Pinkie Pie gave a salute and a low, "Okie-dokie-lokie." She stood by the unconscious pony with one eye shut and the other turned to her charge. Intently she focused her gaze, unwavering, and brought her eye a hair's breadth from Rarity. She stared with so much focus that she didn't notice the loose, dangling tail as it began to slither down from the overhead above her. The tail lightly tickled her hair, and the curious sensation caused her to look up.

In a flash, the vile alien fell out of the overhead and caught onto Pinkie Pie's face.

"Oh, hi!" the pink pony cordially greeted. "I found him!" she gleefully told the others.

"Geez! Pinkie!" Rainbow Dash exclaimed and swooped over to her. She swatted the creature off Pinkie Pie's face and protectively wedged herself between the two, guarding her officer with her life.

Twilight came running over with the tray, but when she saw the alien laying belly up on the floor she only set the tray down besides it. "I didn't see it. Was it in the overhead?" she asked and leaned over the limp critter to inspect it.

Confused, Rainbow Dash mumbled in agitation, "What? It was up there somewhere..." She snapped to her senses suddenly and shouted, "Cover the thing, will you?"

"Wait, wait..." Twilight admonished, still visually studying the alien. With the tenacity and aggression with which it had clung to Rarity, there was no way it wouldn't have coupled with Pinkie Pie unless it physically couldn't anymore. It hadn't even made an effort to get away. She was fairly certain it was harmless, or perhaps even dead. Now that it laid belly-up in front of her, with all its exposed biology showing, she took a moment to stand in awe of it. "By Celestia..." she murmured to herself. It would have been a shame if Rainbow Dash's blow had in fact killed it.

Slowly and deliberately, she brought her lighted prod around and tenderly poked the creature once. It wriggled in place for a moment and tightened its legs with a jerk.

Rainbow Dash instinctively moved to flip the tray over it, however, Twilight calmly but bitterly held up her hoof to block the pegasus. "No. That's just a reflex action..." she said.

"Hehe, he's ticklish!" Pinkie Pie snickered.

Twilight frowned, but was determined to make the best of this loss. "Well, we've got to have a look at this," she told the others and magically plopped the alien into the tray on its back. She carried it over to the dissection table and shined a powerful lamp on it. From a nearby collection of tools she replaced her lighted prod with a thicker and sturdier Futuristic brand Precision Instrument, a complicated looking and exactingly engineered metal stick designed for poking dead things.

The creature was unresponsive to any of her further jabs. Its tail laid curled and lifeless below it, and it held its legs up stiffly like a circle of stone columns around its bare and moist bottom. There was a jagged, mouth-like orifice in which the makings of a long tube organ could be seen. Various sacs and pores seemed present around the mouth, capable of emitting some kind of viscous and adhesive slime. However, just like the top side of the alien, there didn't seem to be any sensory organs, so how it detected its surroundings remained a mystery. Twilight deduced that the secure design was probably part of its incredible survivability, having as few exposed vulnerable areas as possible. Incidentally, that also gave the creature more safe surface area to fold around its target's face and let its organic glue get to work.

The Precision Instrument did not prove entirely effective for her examination. When she looked for an additional tool, she found that Pinkie and Rainbow Dash had crowded around her, stealing looks over her shoulder.

"Excuse me," Twilight said to Pinkie Pie, and pulled a pair of tweezers past the pony. She used them to pull out and examine the fleshy tube that was part of the alien's mouth. It was deceptively long and had a surprising amount of musculature, presumably to let it be flexible and maneuverable, if not quite as prehensile as the parasite's tail. Glands inside the mouth also coated the tube with a different kind of goo; a lubricant to assist in penetration of the target's oral pathway.

The sheer perfection of the alien's design was astounding. That made it all the more heartbreaking for Twilight to admit, "Seems dead enough..."

"Ew," Pinkie Pie whined with an extruded tongue. "I don't want to keep any dead bugs on board the ship."

Twilight couldn't believe the show of disrespect for the potential this creature offered them. "Pinkie, for Celestia's sake, this is the first time that we've encountered a species like this. It HAS to go back," she stressed. "There's all sorts of tests that have to be made... just think of all the things we could learn!"

"Twilight, are you kidding?" Pinkie Pie shot back. "What's to know? Has a tail, bleeds acid, great kisser; if the way Rarity was snogging with it means anything..."

Exasperated, Twilight appealed to her captain, "Rainbow Dash, it has to go back."

"Well... I'd soon as not..." Rainbow Dash sorely replied with a forlorn sigh. She took a hard look a the little monster that had caused such problems. Grotesque and horrifying, encountering this creature was the worse thing to ever have happened on one of these shipping runs. The decision to follow orders and land on this planetoid was a major mistake.

But nothing could be done about all that now. "... But you're the Magic Officer, it's your decision, Twilight," she resigned, and immediately turned to leave the room in a rush. As long as she never had to see that thing again, she was fine with it.

"Rainbow!" Pinkie Pie called after the captain and chased her.

Rainbow Dash stomped away from the infirmary, heading straight back towards the shuttle to get some peace. Pinkie Pie tailed her every step of the way and pestered her. The unrelenting pony followed her all the way down to B deck. "How can I change my mind? The decision's been made," Rainbow Dash said and nonchalantly blew her off. After all this, the tired captain only wanted for this long day to end.

"I'm not-! I'm not trying to change your mind, Rainbow Dash, I just want you to listen- Will you listen to me?" Pinkie Pie persistently implored.

Completely ignoring her, Rainbow Dash stormed forward and passed into the hallway just before the shuttle airlock. In a huff, Pinkie Pie slammed the button on a nearby control panel which sealed the hallway doors. The thick hatch closed down in front of Rainbow Dash and she threw her head up in a loud groan.

"Just tell me how you can let her keep that slimy dead thing on board," Pinkie Pie demanded.

"Look, I just run the ship!" Rainbow Dash shouted in a burst of anger and turned to face her pursuer. "Anything that has to do with the Magic Division, Twilight has the final word!"

"Why?" the inexorable pony retorted.

"Why? Because, Pinkie, that's what the company WANTS to happen!" Rainbow Dash fumed.

"Why?"

Although she still ground her teeth with anger, the pegasus was able to reel in some of her aggression and managed to stop yelling. "Because standard procedure aboard these ships is to do whatever the hock the company tells you to do," she expressed, partially out of her own frustrations with the demeaning and disenfranchising corporate power structure that had always existed above her.

"Wh-"

Rainbow Dash stuffed her hoof in Pinkie Pie's mouth and stared her down with a furrowed brow. Sheepishly, Pinkie Pie smiled from behind the concealing hoof.

When Rainbow Dash finally let go, the concerned pony instead asked, "Did you ever ship out with Twilight before?"

Bouncing a free hoof in front of herself, Rainbow Dash indifferently spurted out the details she remembered. "I went out... five times with another magic officer. Mixie, or Traxie, or something like that. She was a real hoofhead," the captain recalled. She droned on, detached, not seeing how the specifics were relevant or how they would have changed anything. "They replaced her... two days before we left Palominus. With Twilight. I guess because of all the complaints I filed. Certainly took them long enough..."

"I just think Twilight's been acting funny," Pinkie Pie said with suspicion.

The captain pushed her face into the pink pony's and strenuously asserted, "Yeah, well, EVERYPONY'S been acting funny."

Pinkie Pie didn't have a response. The day's events had taken their toll on even her chipper mood and she surrendered with a glum and downtrodden look.

With that, Rainbow Dash reached past the sullen pony and struck the door switch to unseal the hallway. With another sigh, she tried her best to sound sympathetic and asked, "What's happening with the repairs? How's it going?"

"Oh, I talked to Applejack a little bit ago," Pinkie Pie replied. "She said, 'Pinkie, go on and git the heck outta here.'"

"The repairs, Pinkie," Rainbow Dash irritably reminded her.

"Mostly done, I think," the unsure pony mentioned.

Somewhat relieved at the news, yet somewhat frustrated at not having been immediately informed, Rainbow Dash rhetorically complained, "Why didn't you tell me so?"

"Well, because there's still some things left to do," Pinkie Pie lightly protested.

"Oh, like what?" the annoyed pegasus asked with sarcasm.

Thinking, Pinkie Pie answered, "Well... we're blind on B and C decks. The reserve power system's blown. The ice cream's still missing..."

Rainbow Dash scoffed at the list of non-essentials and threw out a dismissive hoof. "Oh, that's a bunch of donkey dropping, we can take off without that," she declared and turned around to head to the shuttle.

"Well, yeah, we can," Pinkie Pie said reluctantly. But she expressed defiance, "But do you really want to tell everypony that there'll be no dessert?"

"Look, I just want to get the heck out of here, alright?" Rainbow Dash moaned while she walked off, without once even looking back.

* * *

Things seemed to be going well. When the engines fired up, there were no immediate warning signs of faulty repairs. With the pre-takeoff checklist completed and all stations having reported no serious anomalies, Rainbow Dash gave the order. The Nomastromo's engines boomed, shaking the vessel as their thrust lifted the heavy ship off the surface. There were countless quakes and bumps as smaller thrusters fired sporadically in order to balance the ship during it vertical ascent. As it gained height, the ship's landing legs retracted back into its frame.

On board, everypony save the still disabled Rarity was at their respective station. They all diligently watched their monitors and instruments, undisturbed by the mighty rolling and rocking of the ship. If any serious alarms went off they needed to be ready to make an emergency landing.

Down in the engineering level, Derpy was the first to spot a potential problem. "Dust in the intakes again," she indicated while she pointed to a flashing light on her board. "Number two is overheating."

"Spit on it for two minutes, would you? For Celestia's sake," Applejack grumbled. It was only a minor problem which posed only slight potential danger during the stressful takeoff itself. They would be clear once they broke atmosphere. She didn't want to land back on that rock just to deal with that.

"Okay!" Derpy confirmed. She noisily started charging saliva in the back of her throat with all the sounds of draining basin.

Pinkie Pie's concerned voice rang over the comm, "We're hot. We're getting hotter."

Ptooie!

"Oh, no, there we go. Back to normal!" she reported, upbeat.

The ship stayed stable enough to continue its climb. Fluttershy once again called out the altitude of the vessel as it worked its way up. Everypony waited for the right mark.

"One kilometer on ascension," the navigator declared.

"Alright. Engage artificial gravity," Rainbow Dash ordered. Fluttershy complied and toggled the ship's gravity controls. The captain gave a nod over to the magic officer.

Twilight alerted the crew, "I'm altering the vector... now."

The Nomastromo tilted backwards and the engines multiplied their force, firing out the rear of the ship. Like a rocket, the vessel shot forward through the air and sliced through the planetoid's atmosphere. The turbulence on board increased in tandem with the acceleration at first but, as they cleared the atmosphere, the violent, shipwide tremors began to subside.

The tense ponies exchanged glances with each other and small smiles started to form on their faces. Even Fluttershy's countdown until they reached orbit had trailed off into a series of faint, happy giggles. The ship slowly came to a smooth ride, with the only sounds being the hum of their equipment. No rattling from the buckling hull, no ceaseless stormy winds... just the drone of their computers and the muffled roar of the engines.

Applejack cheered through the comm, "Walk in the park! We fix something, we stay fixed, right Derpy?"

"Right?" Derpy was heard asking, followed by a loud, metallic crash.

With bright laughs and big smiles, the bridge ponies unstrapped themselves from their seats and celebrated. It was nice to have a positive turn of events for a change. Now all they needed to do was hook the Nomastromo back up to the ore refinery and they could set off immediately for home. Then this cursed planetoid would become the forgotten memory it deserved to be.

* * *

Rainbow Dash, Derpy, Pinkie Pie, and Applejack sat around a small table in the side of the common area. The ship was on course for Equestria, with refinery in tow, but the enthusiasm from the successful takeoff didn't last as long as everypony had hoped. The lingering ghost of Rarity's condition couldn't be banished so easily, and it cast a depression over all the crew.

Applejack picked at a tub of food she had in front herself. After the long hours of repairs, even the garbage offered by this ship was acceptable. She glanced around at her crewmates while chewing a fresh bite: Rainbow Dash sat with forelegs folded as she stared at the wall, Derpy's eyes wandered erratically but there wasn't a hint of joy in her attitude, and Pinkie Pie looked down at a book of ice cream flavors that she sadly flipped through. It was a sour silence, worse than the unsavory food in front of her.

"What I think we should do is just freeze her," she said to lift the stillness. "I mean, she's got a disease, why don't we stop it where it is?"

Rainbow Dash snorted.

"We can always get her to a doctor when we get back home. Right, Derpy?" Applejack reasoned.

"Right?" Derpy asked in confusion. She turned to look but there was nothing except for the white, flat wall of the common room.

Pinkie Pie picked her head up and commented, "Derpy, whenever she says ANYTHING you say, 'right.'"

"... Right?" Derpy repeated, and checked again. It was still just the wall. She turned back to Pinkie Pie in hopeless befuddlement.

Slightly bemused by the antics, Pinkie Pie's eyes started to shine and the corners of her mouth picked up. "Applejack, your staff just follows you around and says ,'right.' She's like a regular parrot," she mockingly accused.

Applejack chuckled. "Yeah, shape up, sugarcube!" she told Derpy, "You're not some kind of parrot, right?"

"Right?" Derpy almost started to turn rightwards again, but froze. A certain cleverness flashed in her crossed eyes and she suddenly and unexpectedly cranked left. It was just Pinkie Pie sitting there, though. "Oh..." Derpy moaned, having hoped for a better discovery. "Hi, Pinkie."

The whole table jumped from Rainbow Dash's kick. "Oh, come on, knock it off!" she furiously yelled and stood up. "We're all going to have to go into quarantine when we get back, and that's it!"

"It's not so bad," Pinkie Pie commented. "I hear they give you all the pudding you want."

Rainbow Dash stamped the floor and then walked over to the main table, fuming and venting her anger in heavy breaths. Her livid haze almost kept her from noticing Fluttershy timidly standing at the entrance to the room with a clipboard in her mouth. It was clear that she was waiting for a chance to enter the conversation, but also that she knew she was going to be adding to their troubles.

"Um... excuse me... but, uh... I finished those calculations, um, Captain Rainbow Dash... the ones that you asked me to do..." Fluttershy explained as delicately as she could.

"Thrill me, will you please?" Rainbow Dash spat out with dry sarcasm.

Fluttershy dropped her clipboard on the table and trepidatiously ran a hoof down her crunched numbers. "Oh, okay... well... based on the time spent off course getting to the planetoid-"

"Just give me the short version. How far to Equestria?" the captain insisted.

The shy pegasus lowered her head and looked away, fearful of the bad news she had to deliver. "Ten months..." she weakly said.

There were groans across the room. Rainbow Dash stamped the ground again and boiled with frustrated anger. "Son of a..." she murmured to herself through her gritted teeth.

A loud comm beep startled the crew, particularly Derpy, who had sat right next to the comm panel. She leapt over the small table in surprise and crashed facefirst into the seat on the other side.

There was a moment of hesitation where nopony seemed to want to answer Twilight's comm call. No possible news could be good news. Finally, Pinkie Pie reached up and switched on the comm.

"Rainbow Dash, I think you should come and see Rarity," Twilight tersely delivered.

"Has her condition changed?" the captain asked.

"It's simpler if you just come and see her," was the response.

"Why do I always have to go and see? Why can you never just tell me?" Rainbow Dash wearily complained.

"Just... just get over here," Twilight said and shut off the comm from her end.

With a tired nod, the blue pegasus made her way out of the room and towards the infirmary. The other ponies began to file out after her. Applejack grabbed her tub of food to take along. "Come on, Derpy," she commanded.

The ditzy pegasus struggled to dislodge her head from the seat, finally getting it free with a loud pop. "Right!" she victoriously called, and followed after Applejack.

As they all approached the infirmary, there was a sudden rush of excitement and raised voices. Through the observation window they saw Rarity, and she was sitting up, completely conscious! She was clothed in her fancy, royal purple bathrobe and her mane had already been partially washed and wrapped up in a towel. Floating a compact in front of herself, she busily applied makeup to fix all that had been destroyed by the sweaty expedition in the pressure suit and cover up the marks left behind by the alien. By the way she had to stretch her neck every time she turned her head, everypony could tell she was incredibly sore from her extended nap.

The ponies shuffled into the room. All seven of them made the tiny infirmary a cluttered space, especially because most of them crowded around Rarity while they avidly tried to chat with her. Only Rainbow Dash hung back, quietly observing Rarity with a serious and skeptical gaze.

"How are you doing?" Fluttershy jubilantly asked the awakened unicorn.

Setting her tub of food aside, Applejack grabbed a cup of water and held it out towards Rarity. "Yeah, how are ya?"

Rarity closed her compact and put it down before she magically accepted the drink. With a cough, she strained her voice to reply, "Terrific. Next silly question." She leaned back and wolfed down the whole cup's worth in one go.

Most of the ponies shared a laugh at her joke while Twilight presented her with a fresh cup of water. Rarity gladly accepted it as well and quickly set to work on it.

"You remember anything about the planetoid?" Rainbow Dash interrupted.

The unicorn stopped her drinking instantly. Steadily, Rarity lowered the cup and swallowed what water she still had in her mouth. She hadn't even thought about what happened since waking up; she had been too preoccupied fixing the nightmare of her appearance. Now that she tried to reach back into her memory, she only felt a startling absence. Various disordered events flashed in her mind but they seemed disconnected and unreal. She stared motionlessly into her half-finished cup of water. At last, with raised eyebrows, she shook her head and shrugged before she went back to drinking.

"What's the last thing you do remember?" Rainbow Dash followed up.

Rarity gasped as she finished the drink and set the cup aside. "I remember... some... horrible dream about..." she said, stumbling about her words. She struggled to recall the details until it all came to her in a rush. "About being commissioned to design a dress for the Princess for an annual gala, but she insisted on this positively gaudy combination of a searing yellow with and a dull brown. I felt like I was choking to death, gagging at such a sight!" she recalled with horror.

Anxiously, she tried to block out the vision by changing the subject. "Anyway... where are we?" she asked curiously. The holes in her mind wouldn't let her connect past to present.

Now convinced enough, Rainbow Dash smiled and told her with a laugh, "We're right here."

"We're on our way home!" Pinkie Pie added with delight.

"Yeah, back to the ol' pony popsicle beds," Applejack laughed before she dug her face back into her food.

The worn and recovering unicorn smiled back, feeling safe in the company of her crewmates. But she lightheartedly protested, "Oh no, I simply must finish fixing my hair first. And this makeup needs to be evened out... I have to recurl my eyelashes, my hooves could use some refinement, I need to brush my tail, and would it be too much to ask that I get a bite to eat before we go back? I'm famished!"

Applejack found agreement on that last point at least, and swallowed her current mouthful before she burped. "I need a li'l something more to eat myself!"

"Yeah, yeah," Rainbow Dash agreed with pleasure. She invitingly swept a hoof in front of herself and said, "One more meal before bedtime. I'm buying!"

* * *

The finest the space-freighter had to offer was laid out for a feast. It wasn't much, but with the worst of their expedition over even this banal, low-grade spread seemed like a victory meal to the gathered ponies. They piled their plates, poured their drinks, and start to indulge in their last dinner before they were set to go into hypersleep for the return journey. The mood was jovial, with shared laughs and even a little bit of singing from Pinkie Pie.

Rarity had cleaned herself up but hadn't changed back into her uniform. Instead she wore plain and simple white clothing, appropriate for their due hypersleep. It was a concession to time. Her spirit had lifted, and she smiled and joked with the rest of the crew as she spooned a large amount of mediocre spaghetti onto her plate.

"The first thing that I'm going to do when we get back, after a trip to a spa, is get some decent food," she said in jest while she pour some seasoning onto her lifeless meal.

Sitting next to her, Applejack chuckled, "I can dig it, sugarcube!" She grabbed a large mouthful of her own food and between chews she squeezed out a garbled, "I reckon I've eaten worse food than this, but then I've tasted better, you know what I'm saying?"

With a slight giggle, Fluttershy giddily noted, "Well, you certainly pound down the stuff like there's no tomorrow."

"Uh-huh," Rarity agreed as she sampled her own food. Applejack's coarse manners always threw her off, but all the same there was a certain relieving charm to it; an ordinariness that felt natural after her recent experiences. This time, the engineer's unrefined behaviors were grin-worthy.

Applejack gave a smirk to Fluttershy and said cleverly, "Listen, I'd rather be eating something else but, uh... right now, I'm thinking food."

Fluttershy instantly flushed and looked away in confused embarrassment.

After she realized what she just said, Applejack paused and rubbed the side of her head. "Woah. How did I never catch on to THAT line before? Uh... sorry 'bout that," she apologized.

Swiftly, Rarity brought the conversation back in line and joked, "You really shouldn't be so eager to eat the food until you know what it's made of, heh." She finished her current bite and held a hoof up to catch a mild cough.

"Ha! No, girl! I don't want to talk about what it's made of!" Applejack enthusiastically responded. "I'm trying to eat this!"

Rarity picked up another forkful and began to put it into her mouth, but she slowed and stopped, trembling slightly. She dropped her fork back onto her plate and raised her hoof again to guard a much stronger, hoarser cough. There was sort of a gagging sound as well.

"What's the matter, sugarcube?" Applejack lightly asked while she slapped Rarity on the back. "The food ain't THAT bad!"

But Rarity's condition seemed to worsen. Her hacking and coughing grew louder and more intense, and her hoof moved from blocking her mouth to rubbing her throat. Her eyes bulged out in strain and her pupils shrank.

"Rarity?" Applejack asked with growing concern. She had even dropped her jesting smile.

All around the table, everypony stopped what they were doing and stared. Only Rainbow Dash kept about her business and dismissed the show, saying, "Oh, she's just being a drama queen. Let her be."

Suddenly, Rarity's hacking ramped up in intensity and became incredibly violent. Her whole body convulsed and she stood up, loudly kicking out her chair from under herself. The raspy gagging sound she produced made it seem like she was trying to speak but couldn't get a word out. At least until she abruptly howled with a horrifyingly painful wheezing noise. The hideous screech was accompanied by a massive, involuntary twitch that caused her to rear up.

"This is serious!" Twilight shouted as she kicked her own chair out and ran over to the spasmodic unicorn.

In response, Rainbow Dash and Applejack both got up as well and tried to get a hold of Rarity. But her thrashing about overpowered their initial efforts and she collapsed on top of the table. Glasses smashed and spilled to the side, followed by even more as the unicorn's legs kicked about uncontrollably. The other two ponies were quickly on top of her again. They rolled her onto her back and tried to get a hold of her flailing limbs.

The remaining ponies rushed up to assist. Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, and Derpy all grabbed her hind legs so that the others could focus solely on her forelegs and upper body. Twilight magically crammed a spoon sideways into Rarity's mouth to keep her from biting off her own tongue in her spasms, and then tried to rapidly assess the problem.

Rarity seemed to lose all connection to the world around her. Her eyes closed shut and her shaking grew more powerful. She almost kicked Applejack and Rainbow Dash off several times while her chest bounced up and down on the table. She seemed desperate to scream but couldn't make any sound other than a burdened, raspy wheezing. Eventually the strained and horrific vocalizations she was making had her heaving sorely, and she unwillingly spat the spoon out of her mouth. Twilight grabbed another utensil for her to chew on, but before it could be put into place Rarity's chest violently thrust into the air, arching her back. The unexpected twitch and accompanied kicks knocked some of the ponies off and they froze at the hideous sound of a sudden snapping and cracking. A small burst of blood shot up from her chest, easily staining her pure white shirt and coat. The event seemed to end her fit though, and she fell back onto the table with a heavy crash before becoming motionless and silent.

Fluttershy shrieked but covered her mouth quickly. The others stared in disbelief for a moment, letting go of whatever limb they were holding. Twilight suspiciously edged in to inspect the bleeding unicorn.

Just before she could lift Rarity's shirt, the spasms renewed, impossibly more powerful than before. Perhaps worse, this time Rarity was able to scream. Her agonized gasps were loud and wet, drowned in the blood she was vomiting up. Her wailing masked the continuous cracking and tearing noise that came from her chest.

Everypony jumped back onto her and attempted to steady her wild limbs.

The screeches and gurgles coming from Rarity became more labored and rhythmic. They accelerated as her whole body seemed to wriggle and writhe back and forth, and the thumping of her chest became extremely prominent as it loudly pounded on the table below her. At last, there was one final thrust of her chest while she spewed a dreadful, dying gasp.

A shrill noise rang out, but it wasn't from Rarity. Her body went limp and her chest burst open in a shower of blood and tissue. The cry came from a small lizard-like creature that emerged out of her, nestled in her exposed organs and ribs.

The shocking scene sent everypony backwards in a leap of surprise and fright. Fluttershy in particular caught a large spray of guts and viscera across her face, and she fell backwards while screaming and crying. Applejack had a moment of panicked reaction and grabbed a knife off the table, but Twilight held her back and loudly advised, "Don't touch it!"

The little, draconic creature slithered into an upright position. The coating of Rarity's blood hid the color of its purple scales and green frills. Jagged spines ran down its back and along its tail, which came to a sharp and pointed end. Although only an infant, it already had a full set of visible, razor-sharp teeth. It opened its tiny, emerald eyes for the first time and gazed about at the crew, relaying a short hiss.

Pinkie Pie's eyes widened, completely shocked at this turn of events. Then, with a sudden, gleeful smile she scooted over to Rarity's corpse and bounced repeatedly with unbridled joy. "OH MY GOSH RARITY CONGRATULATIONS!" she yelled with a wave of bliss. "He's so adorable! What are you going to name him? Why didn't you tell us you were expecting? Who's the-" she stopped her frolicking when she hit upon a startling realization. "... AHHHHHH WE NEED TO HAVE A BABY SHOWER!" Her elated bounding started again, more enthusiastic than before. "I wish you had told me! I would have had everything ready and there would have been cake and presents and I can't wait to tell everypony at home about- ... uh... Rarity?"

The color of the unicorn's cadaver had greatly faded from the rapid blood loss. Her tongue hung out of the side of her mouth and it was almost as if crosses could be seen over her eyes. She was silent, and she was very, very dead.

The pink pony took a few uncomfortable steps backwards and then carefully moved over to Twilight's side. Putting her hoof to the side of her mouth, she asked in a whisper, "Hey... uh... is the baby supposed to come out of her chest like that? I mean, my mom always told me how painful it was and now I guess I can see-"

There was an aggressive hiss and the tiny monster sprang from Rarity's gaping wound. It charged across the table, knocking over any still standing glasses that stood in its way, and it jumped down to the floor. It ran towards the door and disappeared out of the room before anypony couldn't fully realize what had even happened.

An awful silence fell over the whole room, interrupted by Fluttershy's low crying as she stayed sprawled on the floor. Nopony was sure what to even think or feel at this unimaginable and gruesome catastrophe that had struck so suddenly. Rarity's corpse gently kicked and twitched a few last times in post mortem reflex.

"I hope nopony's mad..." Pinkie Pie chimed in, "but I haven't found the ice cream yet. There won't be any dessert."


End file.
